The year 2025 has been designated the United Nations International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. The impetus for the glacier year came from Tajikistan, which is understandable given that the 9,000 glaciers in that country are the mountain headwaters for much of Central Asia.
Though it is difficult to know exactly how many countries will ultimately be involved at this moment, most of the glaciated countries in the world are already participating. Switzerland and France have announced major commitments and even countries without glaciers – like The Netherlands – are participating in the full realization of how much glacial ice contributes to the thermo-regulation of the entire global climate system.
But The Netherlands is only one country among many that are waking up to the importance of glaciers, China and the United States among them. The flow of the life-giving Yangtze River is expected to be reduced to a trickle as the glaciers and snowpacks that feed it melt away as a result of the on-going acceleration of the warming of the global atmosphere. China sees hunger coming, and is doing everything it can to avoid it. The same is true for its Asian neighbours whose food production is located downstream of the rapidly melting glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau.
The United States is in a similar boat. Much has been made recently of the diminishing glacial run-off and its downstream impact on California farms which produce about a quarter of the food grown in the United States. These impacts are compounded by the fact that, as the world continues to warm, more winter precipitation in mountain headwaters will fall as rain as opposed to snow which means that the winter snowpack will be smaller when it melts in the spring. Experts have predicted that the United States will no longer be exporting food to other nations once global warming reaches 2 Celsius. Take heed, Canada.
The Canadian UN Glacier Year Initiative is centred in Alberta simply because this is where the best known and most accessible glaciers in our country are found. There are more than 18,000 glaciers in the Mountainous West. There are more than a thousand in Alberta alone. It is from this expanded region that the latest scientific research outcomes regarding the state and fate of our glaciers originate. As Parks Canada rolls out its 2025 UN Glacier Year program, however, Canadians all across the country will learn what the Dutch and the Chinese already know: that even if there isn’t one nearby, glaciers contribute enormously to the stability of the global climate with direct implications for water security.
But there is a larger reason for paying attention to our receding glaciers. Canada is a nation that emerged from under the ice. Canadians used to see glaciation as a natural cycle of glacial and inter-glacial periods, out of which our prosperity was born. But while the Earth’s history once told us that because of our planet’s orbital and axial eccentricities, the ice would predictably return again in the future, we have now found that the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we have released to date into the global atmosphere is so great that the resulting warming has overwhelmed and cancelled out the effect of those orbital and axial perturbations with the result that cycles of glaciation are not likely to occur again for hundreds or thousands of years, if ever.
It was then that we began to view glacier ice as the cold fuse that prevents the global climate system from overheating. In its rapid departure, the ice is telling us that without that fuse, global warming could get away on us. It was then that we really began to listen to what the ice was telling us.
But there is more. The next generation of Earth scientists has already established that we can no longer talk about glaciers without talking about wildfire and the Pyrocene Age we appear to be entering. That, we think, should be of interest not just to those of us here in the Mountainous West but to Canadians, no matter where they live.
It is worth noting the UN Glacier Year also allows us to address two national security problems simultaneously. It allows us to halt backsliding in terms of climate action by learning more about what we face, and it provides an opportunity to shine on the world stage as an example of everything we stand for as a free and independent nation as we resist current threats to our identity and sovereignty.
For more information on World Glacier Day events please visit our website www.UNglacieryear.ca or visit the magnificent Meltdown: A Drop in Time exhibition at the Whyte Museum in Banff.
Bob Sandford is Senior Government Relations Liaison, Global Climate Emergency Response at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment & Health. Bob lives in Canmore.
