Requiem for a Glacier

2025 is the official “Year of Glacier Preservation,” but what does that mean?

words :: Andrew Findlay

There is human time and there is glacial time. From between about 75,000 until 11,000 years ago, most of North America was frozen beneath ice that was three kilometres thick in places. Known as the Wisconsin glaciation, it was the last ice age to grip the northern hemisphere. Time must have stood still in this virtually lifeless landscape.

The word “glacial” is a metaphor for things that move ponderously and painfully slow. However, that metaphor is melting. The glaciers that we see and know nowadays are vestiges of ancient geological history and they are rapidly leaving the ice age, thanks in large part to human-caused global warming.

Helm Glacier is certainly showing its shriveled age. Nestled on the north face of Gentian Peak near Garibaldi Lake, the Helm is one of the most studied glaciers in southwestern BC.

Federal government scientists have been studying this glacier since the 1960s, when it covered an area of around 4 km2. These days, it has shrunk to just 1 km2, and according to Mark Ednie, a geologist with Geological Survey of Canada, the Helm is not long for this world.

On a late September day in Whistler, Ednie loads his equipment into a chopper headed to Helm Glacier, one of dozens that he monitors in the Western Cordillera of Canada, from the Rockies to the Coast Range. He visits each glacier twice a year—once in the spring to measure snow depth and density, and once in late summer to measure ice melt. Combine these two measurements and you get something called “mass balance,” a metric that offers a more precise measurement to quantify the amount a glacier is growing or shrinking.

“It’s usually in the negative column,” Ednie says.

After a short flight, Ednie and his technician assistant Jason VanderSchoot clamber out of the chopper onto bare ice near the top of Helm Glacier. Meltwater gurgles along runnels carved into the ice while Ednie and Vanderschoot strap crampons to their boots and start descending to the first of six stakes set to help measure latesummer ice melt.

A healthy glacier has two zones: the zone of accumulation, where the ice remains snow-covered year around, and below that snowline (also known as a “firn” line) is the zone of ablation, where more snow is lost than accumulates. Often by summer’s end this zone is bare ice.

Glaciers are in constant motion. Snow in the accumulation zone feeds the ice, which is always moving from the upper to lower reaches of the glacier. However, since Ednie started visiting Helm Glacier in 2018, there has been no zone of accumulation. Whatever snow falls in winter is completely gone by the end of summer.

“So that means the whole glacier is melting,” Ednie says.

He adds that it’s a similar story for most of the glaciers he monitors. In some ways, it’s like being in the business of palliative care. He makes the rounds to ailing glaciers to take measurements the way a nurse regularly takes the vitals of a terminally ill patient. They know the end is near, but they do it just the same.

The United Nations has declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation, an effort to draw attention to the rapid decline of glaciers around the world. Hundreds of millions of people globally depend on rivers that originate in high mountains. In western Canada, the majority of streamflow water is the result of melting mountain snowpack; glacier ice melt contributes less than 5 per cent. However, that small amount comes at an important time, giving streams and rivers a pulse of water during the hottest months.

Glaciers have been called the water coolers of the earth, storing it until we need it the most. When these water coolers vanish, it will have a cascading effect on irrigation, drinking water, fish habitat and how we manage water.

Scientists report the earth is on track to lose one third of its remaining mountain glaciers by the year 2100. That’s why the United Nations declaration has an undercurrent of desperation—a call to action without an easy path forward.

Despite this dim outlook, it’s easy to understand why Ednie loves his job. He grew up in Quebec, where he developed an appetite for rock and ice climbing. A winter spent out west skiing in Rossland got him hooked on the big mountains. Since joining the Geological Survey of Canada in 2004, Ednie’s work has taken him west multiple times every year to study glaciers that have become like old friends.

And even anemic ones like the Helm are still beautiful places to behold. Earth’s history is written in the layered, turquoise-coloured walls of a crevasse like the rings of a tree. They appear, for the most part, still and silent. Yet they are animate, moving imperceptibly by the pull of gravity as they scour, claw, grind and shape the underlying rock, taking thousands of years to forge new landscapes.

For anyone who spends time in Coast Mountains, it’s very hard to imagine them without glaciers. Next to scientists like Ednie who study the ice for a living, mountain guides—perhaps more than any other group—have an intimate relationship with glaciers that is both professional and personal.

Evan Stevens is a Squamish-based guide. Born and raised in New York State, he has lived in Sea to Sky Country since 1998. In span of time so brief it doesn’t even register on a geological scale,

Earth’s history is written in the layered, turquoisecoloured walls of a crevasse like the rings of a tree.

Stevens has witnessed dramatic changes in the Coast Mountains. Moats and bergschrunds are bigger and harder to navigate. Glaciers like the Serratus in the Tantalus Range are so shattered and broken up by late summer that they are becoming too dangerous to travel. Where ice retreats, unstable ground is uncovered, creating new rockfall hazards. In other cases, these changes result in mass wasting events, like the cataclysmic landslide that ripped off the north face of Mt. Joffre in 2019.

According to Stevens, in the context of glacial recession, most people think about the toe or terminus of a glacier. You can witness its retreat year after year, marked by glacial till that looks as though it has been freshly uncovered and piled up by a Cat D9 dozer. But from a mountaineer’s perspective, it’s the thickness of ice—or diminishing thickness—that has the most profound impacts, particularly at that threshold between rock and ice. As the ice thins, the glacier pulls away from cols and mountain passes that historically were simple, straightforward ski descents in winter, but may now require technical rappels to negotiate.

“As guides, we’re always thinking about plan A, B, C and D, and making decisions on the fly,” Stevens says. “But in some cases, the decision is simple—it’s to not go. The seasons are getting shorter and in some places hazards are higher. To be honest, it’s kind of grim. I guess it’s not changing what I do, but it’s changing where and when I do it.”

Glacial travel is now more than simply a physical act; it is also becoming an exercise in nostalgia that strikes at something existential to mountain people: the notion of mountains without glaciers.

“Don’t me wrong,” Mark Ednie says. “It’s alarming, but it’s also scientifically fascinating to imagine what we would have seen hundreds of years ago and what we will see in the future. I have two young daughters and I want to make sure they see these places.”

The clock is definitely ticking.