A UNBC PhD student has completed a four-year-long study measuring glacier mass change in the Columbia River Basin.
Ben Pelto, a PhD candidate in the Geography Program at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), wanted to track just how much change was taking place in glacier mass in the Columbia River basin – data which wasn’t previously available.
“Changes in glacier mass are the direct response to meteorological conditions during the accumulation and melt seasons,” Pelto explains in a news release.
“We derived multi-year, seasonal mass balance from airborne laser scanning surveys and compared them to field measurements for six glaciers in the Columbia and Rocky Mountains.”
Pelto compares studying glacier changes to a bank account where a bank account that is losing money is like a retreating glacier. Snowfall during the winter months is like depositing money into the bank account, and snowmelt during warmer weather is like making a withdrawal.
Pelto says more than 40 volunteers participated in the multi-year evaluation, which took place over 11 field seasons and totalled close to 250 days spent on glaciers near the headwaters of the Columbia River.
His team visited six glaciers twice per year over a four-year period to measure winter snowfall and summer snow and ice melt. They also used an airborne laser scanner to produce detailed maps, and captured 100 glaciers per season.
“We are providing the first large dataset of seasonal glacier mass change for the Canadian Columbia River basin. These estimates are valuable as calibration and validation data for glacier models, better allowing us to predict future glacier response to climate change and runoff from these glaciers as they continue to shrink.”
Pelto says the study was needed because the Columbia River basin benefits from glacier runoff from the 2,200 glaciers in the basin, yet estimates of glacier mass change within the basin were not available
“Knowing how much glaciers contribute to streamflow today is important for understanding how the ecosystems they support, and services they provide, will fare when the glaciers are gone or greatly reduced in size,” says Pelto.
With a focus on a regional area and seasonal glacier mass change, this study builds on an earlier research project led by Pelto’s PhD supervisor, Brian Menounos, who is a UNBC geography Professor and Canada Research Chair in Glacier Change.
That study was released in January of 2019 in Geophysical Research Letters and used satellite images over the past 20 years to track glacier mass change in Western North America.
The results of Pelto’s field study were recently published online in The Cryosphere, an interactive open-access journal of the European Geosciences Union.
The study’s abstract concludes that the results demonstrate that accurate assessment of seasonal mass change can be produced over a series of glaciers spanning several mountain ranges.
Such agreement over multiple seasons, years, and glaciers demonstrates the ability of high-resolution geodetic methods to increase the number of glaciers where seasonal mass balance can be reliably estimated.
You can read the full article in The Cryosphere online.
