Tombstone Glacier

Ok is no more. The Okjökul Glacier in Iceland lost its status in 2019. A funeral was held, and a plaque placed in the moraine to commemorate its disappearance at 415 ppm CO₂. A casualty of climate change that’s causing a rapid loss of ice mass in most of the Earth’s glaciers.

Marker stones

Take a gentle walk from the car park over the moraine in front of the Athabasca Glacier, and you will follow a line of marker stones that record where the ice used to be. A chilling reminder of rapid change in the Anthropocene epoch that will soon be named after a Canadian lake.

Tombstone

The glaciers beneath the double peaks of Tombstone Mountain (3,029 m/ 9,938 ft) in Kananaskis Country, Alberta, Canada never got a mention when they melted out. Some old photographs of glaciers in the Canadian Rockies show what they used to look like, but to date, I have been unable to find an image of Tombstone. Maybe there are some in the Glenbow Archive, maybe not.

Unlike the stroll over the road to Athabasca, it takes most of the day hiking to get to Tombstone Lakes (like the peaks, there are two of them), and you will likely need to camp out before you go back to your car parked on Hwy 40 below Elbow Lake. Or alternatively, keep going the long way home, down along the Little Elbow or Big Elbow until you reach the Little Elbow car park after about five hours on rocky forest tracks (My recommendation: best done on a bike, not by foot!)

Projected deglaciation of western Canada

Using a high-resolution regional glacial model and contemporary climate scenarios from a range of global climate models, Garry Clarke and other researchers in Canada and Iceland came up with a sobering analysis. Their results, published in Nature Geoscience (2015), indicated that by the end of this century, the volume of glacier ice in western Canada would shrink by 60-80 per cent relative to a baseline set in 2005. Their work also projects that the maximum rate for ice volume loss could occur around 2020-2040.

World Heritage. Environmental Change

You can read more about and see photographs of the Athabasca Glacier and other connections with climate change in my zine, World Heritage. Environmental Change. Available at Betula Books (use the button below).