PSU Magazine Winter 2006

These are not things that humans are conditioned to easily accept. "We're really good at slow change. But when things change in the course of a decade, it takes a lot of effort to respond ," Fountain says. "Things can change really fast , and that's what nobody wants." he business of predicting climate change and all of the consequences that go along with it is tricky Dire predic– tions abound and have for quite a while. Fountain points to an article printed in a 1940 newspaper predicting the disappearance of the worlds glaci– ers by the end of the last century. "Consensus among scientists is hard to come by," says Christina Hulbe, PSU assistant professor and Fountain's col– league. (See "Polar Distress" on page 19.) "A good way to think about sci– ence is that it's a marketplace of ideas. lf you get five scientists in a room working on a problem, you get at least eight different ideas." By the same token , she says, any– time you get a broad consensus among scientists about a particular theory, you can bet that the theory has a lot of validity But coming to that consensus can take a long Lime. "My ideas about global warming have changed a lot over the past 10 years. I used to be unsure whether the burning of fossil fuels was a factor. Now I'm pretty sure that it is," Hulbe says. The work of Hulbe, Fountain, and scores of other scientists from through– out the world is being synthesized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose most recent report was titled "Climate Change 2001. " Among its many findings , the report stated that Greenland'.s ice is getting thinner on the perimeter and thicker in the center. It's thicker because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and thus can produce more snow. As the planet con– tinues to warm, the scales will tip to greater melting, Hulbe says. The same scenario is playing out in Antarctica. Fountain likens the glaciers in the Western United States to the proverbial canary in the coal mine: a small indicator of the big picture. glacier's life starts with snow. Snow falls in the mountains, it accu– mulates, and is then replenished with more snow the following winter. One year's accumulation builds on the last, compressing the layers underneath until they become ice. The process repeats itself over many years , and the icy mass becomes ever thicker-in many cases, hundreds of meters thick. Gravity pulls glaciers slowly down the sides of mountains in a process that, over eons, smooths the land surface, turning V-shaped valleys U-shaped. During the last major ice age, which ended about 15,000 years ago , glaciers The South Cascade Glacier (left) , located in Washington's North Cascade Range, shrank incredibly in just the past 30 years (1994 arial photo by John Srnrlod:). Professor Andrew Fountain (above) , says the shrinking of glaciers in the Western United States provides a small glimpse of global warming's effects. WINTER 2006 PSU MAGAZINE 17