Monthly Meeting

Northwest Glaciers
Glacier studies in the western US, exclusive of Alaska, dates to the early 1870s, when they were first ‘discovered’ by science. But the discovery was somewhat ‘controversial.’ In the following decades a gold rush of other glacier ‘discoveries’ spread across the West. After the turn of the century much of the glacier research was accomplished by local hiking clubs. Much of our understanding today, of glacier change in the West is based on the data collected by these clubs. A hiatus in observations coincides with World War II, after which the science changed from an observational geographical approach to a geophysical and modern approach that we follow today. The lecture concludes with a summary of glacier change observed over the past century.