PSU Magazine Winter 2006

covered everything inside the bound– aries of Mt. Rainier National Park and extended to the edge of the Puget Sound Basin. It was during this same period that massive glaciers carved out Yosemite Valley, shearing off the sides of granite mountains to create the verti– cal walls of El Capitan and Half Dome. The lower elevation fringes of glaci– ers melt off in the summer. By Septem– ber, it looks as if the glaciers have retreated back into the higher, colder elevations. Of course, glaciers don't move uphill; they simply shrink. But up until about a century ago, that shrinkage was always reversed in the winter, when fresh accumulations of snow built glaciers back to their previ– ous size-or bigger. The warmer win– ters of the past 100 years have produced less snow. "Glaciers are perhaps the clearest expression of climate change," says Fountain. A collection of old and new pho– tographs that fill his office and appear on a Web site he's put together on the subject all point to the same conclu- The USGS maps of Mt. Hood's Eliot Glacier are incorrect, according to Professor Andrew Fountain, who, through regular measurement, has found the ice field shrinking. 18 PSU MAGAZINE WINTER 2006 sion: The glacial ice in the Cascades, the Sierra Nevada, and the Rockies is melting faster than it's being replenished. Take the Eliot Glacier on the north– east 0ank of Mt. Hood. Old time Maza– mas probably remember the glacier as being bigger and extending farther down the mountain 50 years ago The photographic evidence bears that out: A black-and-white photo from the 1930s shows a much heavier mass of ice than the photo next to it taken more recently. ut you don't have to be particu– larly old to know that conditions are changing. The U.S. Geological Survey maps that climbers use for scaling the mountain show glaciers that are notice– ably larger than they really are. The maps were drawn in the 1960s, Foun– tain says, and are thus out of date. He uses these maps, which you can buy in most outdoor stores, as historic data, not as accurate pictures of what's actu– ally there. Side-by-side photos of the Collier Glacier in Oregon's Three Sisters Wilderness, one taken in 1910 and the other in 1993, show the same thing: shrinkage due to decades of warmer winters. Aerial photography helped PSU glaciologist Thomas Nylean deter– mine that glacial volume on Mt. Rainier shrunk by 25 percent between 1913 and 1994. Forty percent of the glacial ice and snow within North Cascades National Park has vanished over the past 150 years. In fact the only place in the conti– nental United States where you'll find a glacier that is growing in size is Mount St. Helens, according to Fountain. Why? The eruption of 1980 created the perfect snow trap, a steep-side crater facing north, protecting the interior from the warming rays of the sun. Snow and ice are accumulating, but they're starting from scratch. ountain collects data and pho– tographs from a variety of sources, and in the summer months he heads for the mountains, to places such as Glacier National Park, to make his own obser– vations. His ultimate goal is to get a clear picture of what is happening in the mountains and, thus, get a better idea of what is happening with the state of the Earth. "We're always hearing of this chang– ing and that changing. But what we're trying to do is put it all together: link– ing a lot of small studies so that we can gel a continental view of glacier changes and what they might mean for the future ," Fountain says. his is a dream job for Fountain, who , as a boy growing up in upstate New York, became so fascinated with snow and ice that he made a hobby of it. He studied snow0ake~ under a microscope, and even made a collec– tion of snow0ake casts from a chemical kit developed by a local research lab. A friend's father took him ice skating on a lake and pointed out how cracks and bubble patterns formed. He wrote a research paper about lake ice in col– lege, where he learned that he could turn his hobby into a profession. He remembers thinking, "There are people who get paid to do this! " Fountain earned his master's and doctorate while working for the USGS. Then he found his way to Portland State, where he has been on faculty since 1998. He has traveled to Antarctica annu– ally for the last decade to measure changes in that continent's glaciers. Both he and Hulbe have Antarctic glaci– ers named after them. He also has led research projects in Sweden and Alaska. But the American West is his pri– mary focus now. His work is funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation and involves students from high school through graduate level. He developed a collaborative relationship with the National Parks Service, which shares archived photos and data with Fountain's team in exchange for digi– tized copies of the same. He also works closely with the Mazamas, a Portland-based mountain climbing organization that has an extensive collection of old photos. Glaciers have a story to tell. Fountain's job is to decipher it. D Gohn Kirkland, a Portland Jreelance writer, wrote the article "Cyprus on the Line" in the Jall 2005 PSU Magazine)