Glaciers, Marine Species, Salmon - Sweeping Changes Throughout The NW

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"Call it the case of the incredible shrinking glacier. In this icy high country, forty-six of the forty-seven Cascade glaciers observed by Nichols College researcher Mauri Pelto were found to be retreating. Riedel, meanwhile, personally backpacks several miles to monitor four glaciers; he notices the lower-elevation, smaller glaciers on the west side of the Cascades are shrinking, a pattern also found farther south.

This melting promises to change the very image of the Pacific Northwest. Montana's Glacier National Park in 30 years may need to be renamed "the park formerly known as Glacier," as Seattle-based writer John C. Ryan puts it. A hundred of its 150 glaciers have vanished, and the pace is hastening. Or take Washington's white-capped Mount Rainier, that looming symbol of the Northwest depicted on Washington license plates and the label of a venerable local beer. The vast majority of Rainier's glaciers are receding, says Andrew Fountain, researcher and Portland State University geology professor. "They don't recede because they're getting colder, you know what I'm saying?" Fountain says. Whatever the ultimate cause, he continues: "That's global climate change -- right there."

In scene after scene played out around the Pacific Northwest, researchers are uncovering surprises that appear linked to the past century's average 1.5°F rise in temperature and, on the basis of what has happened so far, they predict serious problems to surface in the next century. The surprises are as varied as the region itself, from the dangerously delayed spawning of salmon in British Columbia to the practically regionwide shrunken snowpack and perhaps happier news -- such as the discovery of a butterfly that has colonized Oregon and Washington from the south as temperatures warmed.

"We're seeing things that never happened before to our knowledge," says Elliott Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Redmond, Washington. "These things are consistent with what we would expect in a world that is warming. It would be, in many cases, surprising if this weren't human-caused. "When you think of the state of Washington, do you think of marlin or yellowfin tuna? No. Well, starting several years ago, people started catching marlin, which we think of as tropical and subtropical, and yellowfin tuna off the coast of the Pacific Northwest," says Norse, adding that while the periodic climate shift known as El Niño was the oft-cited culprit, a warming climate is making El Niño more severe, more common, and longer-lasting. Norse never expected marlin and tuna to arrive in the stereotypically cool, rainy region. "That is extremely peculiar," he says.

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Big clusters of light purple lilacs now begin to bud and release their heady, sweet fragrance on average 8 days earlier than they did back in the 1960s. That is an advance of about 2 days per decade, notes a 2001 study published in in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Honeysuckle vines heavy with the tiny thin-tubed flowers of yellow, red, cream, or purple now begin to bud and give off their sweet, almost cloying scent about 10 days earlier. Lilac fans noticed as early as 1984 that their favorite flower was blooming earlier than normal in the American West and Northeast. Their discovery sparked interest from scientists such as Daniel R. Cayan, lead author of the American Meteorological Society study and director of the climate research division of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. He soon found that the West was not alone in ushering in an earlier spring. European botanical gardens in the past few decades have noticed flowers are beginning to bloom 6 days earlier and the growing season has extended by 1 to 2 weeks. Quaking aspen trees in the Canadian city of Edmonton, Alberta, now bud 8 days earlier than in the 1930s. So do the shrubby thickets of choke cherry and small deciduous serviceberry."

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Much, much more at:

http://www.tidepool.org/original_content.cfm?articleid=138322

Not bad if you live elsewhere, either (as I do). :hi: