PSU Magazine Winter 2006

I t takes a minule to really undersLand Lhe scale of whaL's showing in Lhe giant photograph hanging on Andrew Foun– tain's wall. Is LhaL really a ship? Thal lit– tle tiny thing in the lower lefL corner? Indeed it is, and the rest of Lhe photo is taken up with ice: an astro– nomical mass, almost a landform in itself. Great cubic miles of the stuff creaking and grinding its way Lhrough a mountain valley, reaching Lo Lhe sea and the ship as if to swallow it. This photo is of the Columbia Glac– ier in Alaska, taken from a plane in the mid-1980s. Today the ice is gone, hav– ing retreated back inLo the mountains, out of view of most cameras. This same phenomenon is playing out at hundreds of mountain locations all over the world, says Fountain, asso– ciate professor of geology and geogra– phy. The glaciers of Europe, New Zealand, the Himalayas, Mt. Kiliman– jaro, the South American Andes– they're all reLreating. The world saw one example of this retreat in 1991 when hikers found the remains of a Bronze Age man poking out of the ice and snow in the Alps that border Aus– tria and Italy. The man had been buried for 5,000 years ; the world's climate change brought him out. "We know that the overall shrinkage is due to climate warming. There's no doubt about that," says Fountain, who is in the second year of a study docu– menting changes in glaciers of the American West. he earth is warming. Exactly why it's warming, and the extenL to which human activity is contributing to that warming is the subject of constant debate, not only among scientists, but among politicians, industry groups, and environmental organizations as well. The current warming period can be traced to about 1850. For 400 years before that, the Earth was in a period that scientists named the Little Ice Age. You can see evidence of it in the an and literature of that period. The cold, snowy winters of London that Charles Dickens portrays in his stories may have been common in the 1830s, buL certainly not today. Also take a look at Pieter Bruegel's 16th century painting, Hunters in the Snow, in which people are 16 PSU MAGAZlNE WINTER 2006 skating as hunters look on. Tempera– tures today do dip below freezing in Brussels where Bruegel painted. But enough to create ice thick enough for an entire village to play on? "You just don't see that anymore," Fountain says. The Earth came out of the Little Ice Age naturally, Fountain says, "but now we're superimposing human effects on top of the naturally warming cycle." Many people engaged in the debate are saying that humans have contributed By John Kirkland one degree--or between 25 and 50 per– cent of the current warming-to the Earth's temperature in the last 50 years. Sea levels also have risen a few inches in the last century, he says. A third of thaL rise is due to melting glacial ice, and the rest is due to ther– mal expansion of seawater. This is a serious potential problem in places such as Micronesia, where a slight rise in sea level can shrink the size of islands and compromise their supplies of fresh water.