A new study by University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers reveals that the Juneau Ice Field, which is about the size of Rhode Island and located in the mountains behind Alaska's capital, could disappear by 2200 if Earth continues to warm as it has in the recent years. Furthermore, the study predicts that 60 percent of the ice in the field could be gone by 2099.
The survival of the Juneau Ice Field is key for the state of Alaska due to it containing the Mendenhall Glacier, a major Alaska tourist attraction. Last year, 450,000 people at a U.S. Forest Service Center visited the attraction, although by 2099, Regine Hock and her team believe that the glacier's ice will be difficult to find.
"By the end of this century, people will most likely not be able to see the Mendenhall Glacier anymore from the visitor's center," she said.
In addition to its value to Alaska, the Juneau Ice Field is one of the largest ice fields in the Western Hemisphere, covering 1,500 square miles in the Coast Mountains, a range that lines Alaska's Panhandle and a great deal of British Columbia. Approximately 10 miles north of downtown Juneau, the Mendenhall Glacier - a 13-mile river of ice -terminates.
Typically, this modeling uses weather stations in remote mountains, but the team lacked this data due to the absence of these stations. Instead, they were able to model the melting of the ice field using physical characteristics such as sunlight, clouds and their movement and precipitation.
"It just grabs the physical system of the climate," said Florian Ziemen, lead author of the paper.
After obtaining the data, the team had to adjust them to account for Juneau's topography, which is known to be very steep.
"The topography in the Juneau area is very steep," he said. "Just having one data point every 20 kilometers doesn't really resolve the mountain flanks and how the precipitation falls."
The results showed that if the current climate warming trends continue, over 60 percent of the ice will be gone by 2099, and all of the climate models they used predicted no stop in the warming of the Earth.
"Even the lowest emission scenarios that are realistic predict a warming, essentially, all over the world," Hock said. "It's only the question, how aggressive?"
The findings were published online in the March 23 issue of the Journal of Glaciology.
