Runaway Glacier

Out of Central Alaska last week came an exciting story. The Black Rapids Glacier, long dying in its valley 125 miles south of Fairbanks, had come to life. Its mile-and-a-quarter face was shoving toward the Delta River and the Richardson Highway (sole motor road from Fairbanks to the coast), rearing ice crests to 500 ft., breaking off great land icebergs which tumbled thunderously ahead onto the mossy valley floor.

Flying from his post at the University of Alaska, Scientist Otto William Geist put up at a little roadhouse two miles down the highway from where the glacier's runoff water joins the Delta. "The roadhouse shook perceptibly and we could hear the distant moaning glacier . . . for all the world like a gigantic dredge." Nearer to, the groaning, booming and thundering was even more awesome. "The glacier is bifurcated. One fork is moving into the other, grinding and crunching at a point five miles back. The intersection is the scene of a giant upheaval. . . . Three days ago we could walk to the face of the glacier. Now so much water is flowing we could not walk along the front." Fear that the glacier might dam the two-mile-wide Delta River, block the Richardson Highway and thus shut off Fairbanks from the outer world was not lively, although "the glacier is estimated to have moved three and one half miles since October."

Startled at such a rapidly moving glacier, youthful Henry Bradford Washburn, veteran of many Alaskan expeditions and an authority on Alaskan glaciers, reached for a pencil and pad at his desk in the Harvard University Institute of Geographical Exploration. After making quick calculations, he announced:

"Absolute hokum!* That would be 150 feet of travel per day. The fastest moving glaciers in the world, in New Zealand and Greenland, only move 30 feet per day." Dismissing the report from Scientist Geist that heavy rains have possibly released soft material along the contact points and lubricated the glacier's groove, causing it to move. Glacialist Washburn explained that glaciers move because of pressure in their catchment basins at their sources. Alaska's glaciers are survivals of the ice age on the North American continent. Washburn believes that Alaska's glaciers are dwindling, will eventually disappear. The Black Rapids Glacier is a case in point.

"Recent rains would not cause the glacier to move. Earthquakes or a couple of winters of unusually heavy snows ten years ago, or both, are the cause. The whole area of Alaska is an earthquake zone. Added weight in the ice-filled catchment basin, caused by new snows or an earthquake avalanching down old ice and snows from the higher slopes forces an impulse through the glacier. It is a wave motion and the longer the glacier, the longer it takes to reach the foot. Scientists pooh-poohed a man named Lawrence Martin when he declared right after the Alaskan earthquake of 1899 that it would set a whole string of coastal glaciers in motion years later. He made up a time-table for each glacier. It was surprisingy accurate. From 1906 to 1910, just as he prophesied, each glacier began to move.

"But this movement exhausts the catchment basins. And even the heaviest Alaskan snowfalls we can hope to expect, are inadequate to compensate. This wave motion has a suction effect, drags a lot of ice with it, thins the glacier over its length. When the impulse has expended itself, there follows a period of very rapid shrinkage at the foot of the glacier. Black Rapids Glacier may continue to move for six months to two years. Then it will recede. Five years hence it will have dwindled five miles back up its valley."

*Geologist Ernest N. Patty at Fairbanks declared this week that if the Black Rapids Glacier is moving as reported, it is traveling 220 ft. per day, a world record. Attempting to find the facts, Dean James H. Hance of the Territorial School of Mines flew to the glacier, due to winds could make no landing, no close aerial inspection of the glacier; found only that "it apparently has advanced a long distance."

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