PSU is nation’s leading institute for glacial research

Due to the research efforts of Department of Geology Chair Dr. Andrew Fountain and Dr. Christina Hulbe, a professor and glaciologist, Portland State is now the leading institute in the U.S. for glacial research in the western states. 

Fountain and Hulbe, along with a team of graduate students, are working on a multi-year project designed to catalogue all the glaciers in the western region of the U.S., from Wyoming to the west coast. 

“The goal with this project is to gain a more broad and comprehensive understanding of as many glaciers as possible…creating a Pan-Western perspective,” Fountain said.  

Ultimately, this will create a centralized repository of information that other research organizations can tap into.

When the project began, Fountain said he discovered old photographs of the glaciers being studied in the archives of the National Park Service. While many of the photos his team has managed to tease out of the various National Park archives date from the early 1900s, several go back as far as the late 1800s. 

“Many of these glaciers go unnamed even today,” Fountain said. 

The importance of this research extends beyond its purely scientific genesis, as glaciers provide one of the most reliable sources in nature for determining whether a regional climate is changing, according to Fountain.  

Glaciers exist within a delicate cycle of growth and recession, due to seasonal precipitation (snowfall) and summer heat (runoff). Though glaciers crawl at a slow pace, their growth or recession can often be measured in decades, Fountain said. It is a generally accepted fact that not only in the western U.S., but also globally, glaciers are receding. 

“The glaciers in the western U.S. are retreating like crazy, and the cause of this is global warming,” Fountain said. “Rising air temperatures across the globe are the predominant reason glaciers are shrinking.”

In the Northwest, where Fountain has conducted a large amount of research, the results of measuring the recession rate of the glaciers on Mount Hood leads the scientific community to predict that glacial runoff from Mount Hood is going to drop by nearly one-third by the year 2050, according to Fountain.  

While this timeline is striking, Fountain said glaciers in the Three Sisters area are retreating faster than those at Mount Hood.

However, the difference in recession rates may owe more to topographical issues than to radically different climates in these two areas of Oregon. Although the greater Portland area does not rely much on glacial runoff as a source of drinking water due to the large amount of rainfall it receives throughout the year, shrinking glaciers and excessive glacial runoff on Mount Hood do pose potential hazards, Fountain said. 

For instance, in November of 2006, the White River on the east side of Mount Hood overflowed and washed out sections of Highway 35. This caused months of road closures and an estimated $20 million in damages. 

“Receding glaciers have increased the hazard in the Alpine area,” Fountain said. As glacial valleys retreat, they are replaced with high, steep walls and debris of rock and boulders. Combined with heavy rainfall, the likelihood for a mud and boulder slide containing as much as a million cubic yards of rock becomes imminent. 

According to Fountain, by continuing to study the growth and recession cycles of as many glaciers as possible in the Western U.S., his team will have “about as good a record as you can for the past century.” ?