Mountaineering
One Man's Quest to Map a Shrinking Glacier
Glaciers are losing the global warming fight, but Will Gadd digs deep beneath the ice to learn more.
I still remember getting out of our car with him and walking for just a few minutes to the toe of the mysterious blue glacier. As I began climbing, I used the Athabasca Glacier as something of an ice road into the mountains and descended down it from many of the surrounding peaks.
One day, as I spanned the distance between the toe back to my car, I remembered how close the toe seemed as a kid and checked my map. The blue markings showed how far the glacier had receded since I was a kid, but again, in just 20 elapsed years the map was totally inaccurate.
Over the years the glacier has receded
© John Price/ Red Bull Content Pool
These glaciers — Kilimanjaro and Athabasca — had withstood millennia of glacial recession and advance, but not this cycle. Curious, I contacted Professor Martin Sharp, a scientist at the University of Alberta, and organized an expedition in conjunction with the Canada Science and Technology Museum that ended up turning into a series of trips into the Athabasca Glacier.
Over the last few years I've used my ice climbing skills and guide training to help scientists reach otherwise inaccessible places, such as the inside of a glacier. With Professor Sharp, our objective was to understand more about how water was moving under the glacier so that we could better model its recession.
Into the glacier
The last of the light disappears around 165 feet
© John Price/ Red Bull Content Pool
Our voices echoed as I fixed ropes and organized the ice cave for safety during our first descent into the glacier. Professor Sharp didn't look completely convinced as he rappelled into the small hole we had to dig through the winter snowpack and into the moulin, but his grin was broad once he was through.
"We've sketched and predicted what this would look like," Sharp said, excited that we'd come away from the expedition with photos that scientists in his field had not had the opportunity to capture until now.
Shocking discoveries
The light of headlamps was the only light they had
© John Price / Red Bull Content Pool
What really surprised us all was that even though the air temp was -40 degrees Fahrenheit outside of the glacier, it was only 30 degrees deep under the glacier.
"This is a temperate glacier, meaning it is only at about 30 degrees most of the time," Sharp explained. "If global temperatures rise even one degree then this can result in dramatic changes for the glacier."
As we worked deeper into the cave, stringing ropes, climbing around pools of semi-frozen water, Professor Sharp made another discovery.
These yellow stains on the wall aren’t from the rocks. I think these are biofilms, and nobody has ever seen under a glacier before.
Biofilms form naturally all the time (the plaque on your teeth is a biofilm), but how could one grow inside a glacier in the relatively low light under dozens of feet of ice? In hopes of finding some answers, samples of the biofilms are currently being analyzed at the University of Bristol under the direction of Ashley Dubnic, a PhD candidate and recognized expert on the biology of glaciers.
Professor Sharpe examines the ice with wide eyes
© Christian Pondella/Red Bull Content Pool
In efforts to gain as much information as we could, we felt it was important to see how far down the ice cave system went and attempted to measure the depth of the glacier. If we could reach where the glacier connected with the earth, the bed surface, Sharp and other scientists could better understand the loss of depth, which results in a much greater loss of ice volume than the obviously visible horizontal recessing.
Gadd and Sharpe head toward the unknown
© Christian Pondella/Red Bull Content Pool
A hundred feet below the surface we had to use our headlamps, and at 130 feet the last shards of light disappeared. Things got more interesting 325 feet below the surface though, where we started to see wild cracks in the walls. This discovery stunned Professor Sharp because deep glacier ice usually flows like a liquid due to pressure.
At 360 feet, I felt the pressure of the unknown, the kind of stuff that is often fatal in new high-risk environments. At this point, even though we thought we were close to the bed surface, we called it a day — the first rule of adventure is not to take stupid risks.
Though we never reached the glacier's meeting point with the surface, we could see that we were only 60-100 feet above it when we had a chance to plot the survey.
The certainty of the Earth's climate is uncertain
© Christian Pondella/Red Bull Content Pool
When I showed the pictures of the trip to my children, the shapes and colors entranced them. But then, as I looked at the mesmerizing pictures with my kids, it hit me that I wasn't helping them prepare for just a warmer world, but a world that will change in ways far more radical and unpredictable than we can imagine.
This isn't just about less ice. It's also about a world where my life as a climber and guide is left unknown. And, frankly speaking, this terrifies me.