Glaciers

More than 99% of Alaska's large glaciers are in retreat or thinning, a new book by the U.S. Geological Survey says. Glaciers in nearly every mountain range and island group are experiencing "significant retreat, thinning or stagnation," particularly those at lower elevations, according to "The Glaciers of Alaska," the agency said Monday. About 5% of Alaska is covered by more than 100,000 glaciers. Those at elevations below 4,900 feet are retreating the most. Some glaciers at higher attitudes, where temperatures are lower, have expanded.

In a discovery that partly answers the question of where all the water went on Mars, scientists have found vast, debris-covered glaciers much nearer the equatorial region than anyone had expected, according to a report Friday in the journal Science. The glaciers, estimated to contain at least as much water as Lake Huron and possibly as much as the entire Great Lakes, were found by ground-penetrating radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. "We have found a big chunk of the missing water that people have known must be there," said Ali Safaeinili, a member of the radar team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.

High in the Himalayas, above this peaceful valley where farmers till a patchwork of emerald-green fields, an icy lake fed by melting glaciers waits to become a "tsunami from the sky." The lake is swollen dangerously past normal levels, thanks to the global warming that is causing the glaciers to retreat at record speed. But no one knows when the tipping point will come and the lake can take no more, bursting its banks and sending torrents of water crashing into the valley below.

The Qori Kalis glacier in the Andes of southwest Peru is retreating by about 600 feet a year. Its icy blue headwall is melting away. As the ice disappears, so does the water supply for hundreds of thousands of people in the valley below. Cuzco, the closest big city, is already starting to ration water. "You can almost sit there and watch it retreat," says Lonnie Thompson, a 58-year-old Ohio State University geologist whose research first brought him to the glacier in the late 1970s.

Mysterious debris fields found far from the poles on Mars were made by glaciers, possibly formed just like glaciers are on Earth -- by the buildup of snow, researchers from Brown University reported Friday in the journal Science. The glaciers would have resembled those found on Earth in places such as Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa or the Andean peaks in South America, the researchers said, and probably formed when Mars was tilted on its side five million years ago.

Greenland's vast glaciers are dumping ice into the ocean three times faster than they did 10 years ago because of increasing temperatures, suggesting that sea level could rise even more quickly than current projections. The study, published today in the journal Science, found that the glaciers contributed 53 cubic miles of water to the Atlantic Ocean in 2005, resulting in about a 0.02-inch rise in sea level.

Gripping a bottle of Jack Daniel's between his knees, Jay Zwally savored the warmth inside the tiny plane as it flew low across Greenland's biggest and fastest-moving outlet glacier. Mile upon mile of the steep fjord was choked with icy rubble from the glacier's disintegrated leading edge. More than six miles of the Jakobshavn had simply crumbled into open water. "My God!" Zwally shouted over the hornet whine of the engines.

For 5,000 years, great tongues of ice have spread over the 3-mile-high slopes of Puncak Jaya, in the most remote reaches of this remote tropical island. Now those glaciers are melting, and Lonnie Thompson must get there before they're gone. To the American glaciologist, the ancient ice is a vanishing "archive" of the story of El Nino, the equatorial phenomenon driving much of the world's climate. More than that, the little-explored glaciers are a last unknown for a mountaineering scientist who for three decades has circled the planet pioneering the deep-drilling of ice cores, both to chronicle the history of climate and to bear witness to the death of tropical glaciers from global warming.

For an hour or so, Greenland had its own mighty waterfall, flowing secretly at three times the volume of Niagara. A meltwater lake on the surface of a glacier suddenly emptied in July 2006, sending millions of gallons of water through cracks in the ice sheet to the ground, researchers reported Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.

Here's a discouraging metric: Google the phrase "endangered places" and you'll get more than 30,000 results. The Natural Resources Defense Council wants to preserve the white water of Patagonia's Futaleufu River; the World Wildlife Fund urges saving the Bering Sea; Concierge.com (the digital imprint of Conde Nast Traveler) encourages adventurers to see the Swiss glaciers before they succumb to global climate change. The clock is ticking on the fabled snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and for the same reason.