OPA Urges Action on Park’s Climate Plan
Dec. 2, 2022
Olympic Park Advocates joined with the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) and Olympic Climate Action (OCA) in a letter to the Park urging action on the Park’s 2009 Climate Action Plan.
Olympic National Park (ONP) joined more than 140 national parks in assessing carbon emissions, conducting public workshops, and developing greenhouse gas reduction plans. The Park’s goal was to reduce carbon emissions 30% below a 2006 baseline by 2016. The 2011 National Park Service Green Parks Plan upped that to 35% by 2020, by actions like greening the fleet, making buildings more efficient, and prioritizing the use of renewable energy.
OPA’s letter noted that the Biden administration’s Zero Emission Vehicle program for federal agencies could help ONP meet its goals since transportation is the biggest source of the Park’s greenhouse gas emissions. Our letter suggested other areas of potential emissions reductions.
You can read OPA, NPCA, and OCA’s letter here.
OPA Helps Fund Glacier Research at ONP
Olympic National Park’s glaciers are not only beautiful and iconic, they are a critical reservoir of cold, fresh water for domestic and agricultural uses as well as aquatic habitat for salmon and trout. Due to cyclical weather patterns and pronounced human-caused global warming, Olympic glaciers are thinning and shrinking at an accelerating and alarming rate.
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Over the last century, the Olympic Mountains have lost half of their glacier-covered area. Blue Glacier on Mt. Olympus lost 20 percent of its mass in just the last 30 years; Anderson Glacier on Mt. Anderson lost 77 percent. (See “Vanishing Glaciers in the Olympics,” Voice of the Wild Olympics, Winter 2014.)
Under the direction of Dr. John Riedel, glaciologist at North Cascades National Park, ONP scientists began an intensive three-year study in 2014 measuring the mass balance (gain and loss) of the Blue and Eel Glaciers in response to climate change. With 2016 funding uncertain, OPA contributed through Washington’s National Park Fund to help complete the study. With our contribution, the funding goal was reached. In April scientists visited both glaciers to measure the winter’s snow depth and density and place ablation stakes along their centerlines. Researchers then hiked to the glaciers in mid-summer and took balance measurements and then again in late September and made final measurements.
As ONP researcher Bill Baccus explained, “A third year of funding allowed us to document the glaciers’ annual mass balance for three consecutive years and helped us to better understand why Olympic glaciers are declining more rapidly than others in this region … By having multiple years of mass balance data, we capture glacier responses and streamflow contributions from different climatic conditions, strengthening our ability to model future responses under climate change.”
OPA is proud to partner with Washington’s National Park Fund and Olympic National Park on this important research.
Vanishing Glaciers in the Olympics
by Tim McNulty
Dr. Jon Riedel is a geologist and principle investigator for North Cascades National Park’s glacier monitoring program. In 2013 he gave an eye-opening presentation at Peninsula College on the state of glaciers in the Olympic Mountains.
Riedel has been studying glaciers at North Cascades since the mid-1980s. He and his team recently completed a study of Olympic National Park glaciers. Olympic glaciers are critical in providing cold, fresh water for domestic and agricultural uses as well as aquatic habitat for salmon and trout, especially in late summer and fall, times of little rain. But due to cyclical weather patterns and pronounced human-caused warming, Olympic glaciers are shrinking and thinning at an accelerating rate.
Olympic National Park glaciers were last studied in 1982. From then until 2006, 34 percent of glacier-covered area was lost in ONP. During the same time period, 20 percent of Vancouver Island, 10 percent of B.C. Coast Mountains, and 9 percent of North Cascades glacier area were lost.
In the last century alone, the Olympics have lost more than half of their glacier-covered area.
The relative low elevation of Olympic glaciers make them hypersensitive to climate change. In warming periods, low-elevation glaciers melt more quickly and more moisture falls on them as rain rather than as snow. During the last 50 years, winter temperatures at Blue Glacier on Mt. Olympus rose 3 degrees Celsius. In the last 30 years, the Blue has lost nearly 20 percent of its mass.
During that time Ferry Glacier in the Bailey Range has disappeared—the Lillian nearly so. The Cameron and Humes glaciers are shrinking badly. Of the eight valley glaciers surveyed in 1982, only four remain as valley glaciers; the others have retreated to their upper basins.
Riedel pointed out that if a glacier faces south, the loss is compounded: Jeffers Glacier on Mt. Olympus lost 61 percent of its area in the past 30 years; Anderson Glacier on Mt. Anderson lost 77 percent.
During the Little Ice Age, from 1350 to 1900 A.D., glaciers expanded throughout the northern hemisphere. Olympic glaciers reached their maximum Little Ice Age expansion around 1700. Since then, the Olympics have lost about 55 percent of their glacier-covered area. Studies showed that Blue Glacier and others thickened and built again in the 1970s, but have been mostly thinning and receding since 1976.
Riedel’s surveys indicate that 184 glaciers remain in the Olympic Mountains but east of the Bailey Range, where precipitation is markedly less, most glaciers are at the “tipping point” and could disappear in mere decades. Riedel would like to re-start intensive mass-balance studies for the Blue and Anderson glaciers to provide solid data for west- and east-side glacier response to climate change. OPA strongly endorses this measure.
Glacier loss in the Olympics has serious implications to human communities as well as critical aquatic habitats that will reverberate throughout the Olympic ecosystem. Asked what could be done, Riedel said, “In the long term we need to address human impacts to climate.”
For more information on Dr. Riedel’s glacier monitoring program, click here.