Weather
Every March, glacier “watchers” take to the skies to photograph snow and ice on glaciers clinging to high peaks along the length of New Zealand’s Southern Alps, explains The Conversation.
The summer of 2017-18 was New Zealand’s warmest on record and the Tasman Sea experienced a marine heat wave, with temperatures up to six degrees above normal for several weeks. The loss of seasonal snow cover and older ice during this extreme summer brings the issue of human-induced climate change into tight focus. The annual flights have been taking place for four decades and the data on end-of-summer snowlines provide crucial evidence. The disappearance of snow and ice for some of New Zealand’s glaciers is clear and irreversible, at least within our lifetimes. Many glaciers we survey now will simply vanish in the coming decades.
When Trevor Chinn began studying New Zealand’s 3,000 or so glaciers in the 1960s he wanted to understand how snow and ice changed from year to year. Trevor decided to do annual glacier photographic flights, looking for the end-of-summer snowlines – a feature about halfway between the terminus and the top of a glacier where hard, blue, crevassed glacier ice usually gives way to the previous winter’s snow. The altitude of this transition is an indicator of the annual health of a glacier.
Trevor Chinn took part in this summer’s flight and said:
This year is the worst we’ve ever seen. There was so much melt over the summer that more than half the glaciers have lost all the snow they had gained last winter, plus some from the winter before, and there’s rocks sticking out everywhere. The melt-back is phenomenal.
Continuing the snowline photograph work will allow us to better identify climate change tipping points and warning signs for our water resources – and therefore better prepare for an uncertain future.
