Researchers studying the future of water and ice in Canada are predicting that by the year 2100, glaciers and icefields in the Canadian Rockies will have melted.
Our little corner of the world is rapidly changing and in 87 years, as Canmore writer Bob Sandford shares in his new book, Cold Matters: The State and Fate of Canada’s Fresh Water, published by Rocky Mountain Books, it will be practically unrecognizable to those of us living today.
Cold Matters: The State and Fate of Canada’s Fresh Water pulls together the science and the implications behind research funded by the Canadian Foundation for Climate Atmospheric Sciences, specifically two CFCAS networks: the Improved Processes Parameterization & Prediction Network (IP3) and the Western Canadian Cryospheric Network (WC2N).
To illustrate the coming changes, Sandford invites readers to imagine taking a drive up the Icefields Parkway in 2100, when the ice that defines that region is all but gone.
By 2100, Sandford writes, the Crowfoot and Bow glaciers have melted. So have the Wapta Icefield and the glaciers that flow from it, including the Yoho Glacier, which feeds Takakkaw Falls. The once mighty Takakkaw Falls will have been reduced to a dribble.
Peyto Glacier will likely have vanished by 2100, as well. And with it gone, Peyto Lake will shrink to half its current size. The lake will also lose its brilliant blue-green colour, as the flow of rock flour ground up by the moving ice will stop.
Further north along the parkway, as seen from the Parker Ridge viewpoint, the Saskatchewan Glacier will have beat a hasty retreat away from where it currently terminates.
Just north of the Saskatchewan Glacier, the Columbia Icefields, a place where Sandford points out the Pleistocene never ended, will have shrunk by as much as 200 square kilometres, while the Columbia Icefield’s most famous arm, the Athabasca Glacier, will have melted.
The Icefields Parkway will still no doubt be beautiful, but without glaciers and icefields, it will have lost its soul. More importantly, as Sandford points out, it will have lost its vital role as a storehouse of freshwater.
Over time, by 2005, for example, Banff National Park has lost 29 of approximately 365 glaciers present in 1985. In a strange twist, however, between 1985 and 2005, the number of glaciers actually grew as bigger glaciers split into smaller ones.
In the North Saskatchewan River Basin, meanwhile, glaciers have decreased in area by 22 per cent. In the South Saskatchewan Basin, that number is 36 per cent.
What’s happening in the Rockies is not unique to this region. Thirty glaciers studied across the world since 1976 have seen a cumulative loss of 20 per cent.
All told, it means Canada’s water resources are in jeopardy.
“These research outcomes blow the myth of limitless abundance out of the water, so to speak,” Sandford writes in Cold Matters. “Given current growth trends, significant parts of the country are going to be water scarce in the future if they are not already. The decline of stream flows in Alberta’s major rivers, for example, has clear public policy implications, especially where stream flow is already fully allocated at its current level.”
As Cold Matters is primarily a book about the science behind how researchers are predicting the effects climate change is having on ice, it is heavy on the science and at times a difficult, if not challenging, read.
But don’t let that scare you off.
The science behind these predictions is important as it has wide-reaching implications for all levels of governments. For the average reader, however, when Sandford specifically discusses those implications and how it will affect us directly, such as how the Icefields Parkway will look in 2100, Cold Matters really stands out.
Cold Matters is a dramatic and disturbing read from that perspective and it tells us that cold really does matter and those long, freezing winters we love to complain about are extremely important.
Cold matters for glaciers, snow and permafrost that define the Arctic, but most importantly, it matters for our supplies of fresh water.
“From a public policy point of view, perhaps the first thing that may need to be realized is that the sheer number of unresolved issues we face with respect to the management of our water resources makes us all highly vulnerable to the inevitable effects of deep and prolonged drought and climate-change-related impacts on our water supply,” Sandford writes.
Cold even matters to our definition of ourselves as Canadians – it’s made us who we are. Look at all the stereotypes we proudly embrace: everything from tuque wearing hosers and the Great White North to the igloos we all live in, even those within an easy drive of the border.
So in a warming world, just as the Icefields Parkway will lose its identity without cold, who then are we?
Cold Matters: The State and Fate of Canada’s Fresh Water, published by Rocky Mountain Books is available for $29.95.
