grist.org · 6 hours ago

Glaciers Around the World Are Endangered — but No Two Are Alike | Grist

A glacier scientist who has circled the planet collecting ice stories offers something rarer than data here: a reminder that even in an age of loss, the world retains the capacity to surprise. Inside the crater of Mount St. Helens, born from the same 1980 eruption that destroyed most of the volcano's ice, a baby glacier has been quietly growing - split in two by a second eruption, then healing itself, advancing more than a thousand feet between 2009 and 2019. In Azerbaijan, where 77 percent of glacier area vanished in just two decades, the author notices something almost as telling as the ice loss itself: "Perhaps the first step of a glacier disappearing from a landscape is it disappearing from conversation." And in Japan, snow patches long dismissed by science turned out to be glaciers that had been flowing, almost imperceptibly, for 1,700 years - existing at the edge of definition, persisting through centuries of summers and human indifference alike. What this glaciologist is really collecting, it turns out, are not just measurements but a kind of witnessing - the patient, humbling work of paying attention to what the world is doing below 30,000 feet, where the stories are neither simple nor finished.