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18 Jul 09 - A few weeks ago I ran an article about
Alaska's Hubbard Glacier advancing 7 feet per day. Here's a lot more
information about Hubbard Glacier, including a link where you can track
its progress.
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Hubbard Glacier
north of Yakutat crept to within 100 yards of Gilbert Point in
June 2007. George Kalli of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
took this photo in May 2007. |
16 Jan 08 – “As you read this, a rogue glacier is
again threatening a small town.
“Hubbard Glacier dips its tongue into salt water about 40 miles north of
Yakutat, Alaska, home to about 600 people. Fed by fields of ice so
immense that the glacier will rumble forward regardless of how warm the
planet gets in the near future, Hubbard Glacier made headlines in 2002
when it bulldozed gravel into Gilbert Point, pinching off Russell
Fiord’s link to the sea and creating the largest glacier-dammed lake in
the world. Before the gravel dam broke, water within the lake rose more
than eight inches each day and threatened to spill into a world-class
steelhead stream near Yakutat.
Hubbard Glacier has been thickening and advancing
since scientists first measured it in 1895. After the glacier dammed the
fiord in 1986, the new Russell Lake rose 83 feet above sea level before
the ice-and-gravel dam broke. In 2002, Russell Lake reached 49 feet
above sea level before the dam burst and the water rejoined the ocean
with a flood 30 percent greater than the largest measured flow of the
Mississippi River at Baton Rouge.
If the plug of Hubbard Glacier again holds fast
against Gilbert Point (as old river channels say it last did in about
1860), rainfall and glacial melt would fill Russell Lake until it
reaches about 132 feet above sea level. Then, the water would spill over
into an old channel of the Situk River, and flow from the river to the
Gulf of Alaska. The Situk, now a clear-running stream with the highest
population of wild steelhead in Alaska and possibly the world, would
become a glacial stream that could be as large as the lower Snake River
in Idaho.
See entire article:
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF18/1890.html
Thanks to Robert Nech for these links
Ned Rozell is a science writer at the Geophysical Institute, University
of Alaska Fairbanks.
Here's a good map of the area:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Hubbard_Glacier_Alaska_Map.jpg
Here's where you can monitor the glacier.
http://www.glacierresearch.com/
See also
Alaska's Hubbard Glacier advancing 7 feet per day!
See also Alaska’s
Hubbard Glacier still advancing
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