Scott Beason has worked on and around the ice of Mount Rainier for nearly two decades. When I asked if he could see it changing in that time, he gave a kind of rueful laugh.
"Lately we've had some glaciers retreating 3 to 6 feet per day in the summertime," Beason said. "You can definitely see that. It's climate change before your eyes."
Beason, the Mount Rainier National Park geologist, just published a piercing paper about our mountain, the ice king of America. (It has the most glacier ice of any peak in the Lower 48.)
Using a photo-imaging technique for estimating 3D volumes called "structure from motion," Beason and three other researchers compiled the most precise review yet of just how much glacial ice is up there.
The story is not good. Mount Rainier is melting.
One of the mountain's 29 glaciers, the south-facing Stevens, has withered away entirely, the review found. Two more, Pyramid and Van Trump glaciers, lost 42% of their ice volumes just between 2015 and 2021, when the latest aerial photos were taken.
"That's a massive amount of ice loss in a short period of time," Beason said. "It was just alarming to see the rate that those two glaciers have disappeared."
Another glacier scientist, Mauri Pelto, said in a blog post that more recent satellite imagery taken in the fall of 2022 suggests those two glaciers are now gone, too. (They've broken into patches, he told KUOW, which reported that all three glaciers are effectively extinct.)
Pelto has been measuring Cascade glaciers every summer now for 40 years. Seven years ago I profiled him in a column that said that due to rising temperatures, his glacier project had turned him into a sort of "town crier of decline."
"It is no longer a shock," Pelto wrote on his blog this month, about Mount Rainier now having only 26 glaciers instead of 29. "The pace is quickening, and the number of glaciers experiencing a disequilibrium response is skyrocketing."
Beason's paper estimates that Mount Rainier has lost more than half its total ice since about 1900. Twenty-one square miles of glacier is gone, out of about 50. The newer measuring techniques show it has 29 square miles left.
The rates of retreat have accelerated — up 26% in the past seven years, compared to the historical average, the paper says. Lately Rainier has been shedding 1 square mile of glacial ice every five years.
Beason is not a climatologist, so his paper doesn't tease out how much of the melt was natural, and how much may have been due to an emissions-fueled warming climate. As a geologist, he says he tends to look backward. But others have used these rates of ice loss to model Rainier's possible future.
"There's no model I've seen that shows zero ice," he said. "But any glacier below 10,000 feet is really in a lot of trouble. The ones higher than that will still have ice, but they'll be a lot smaller."
It would mean a mountain with an ice cap, not covered head to toe. It also would be a profoundly different ecosystem in the park, as well as downstream, with less and warmer water for multiple rivers in the late summer.
"This is going to be the fate of all the glaciers unless we take some action," Pelto said.
But what action?
I asked both Beason and Pelto what, if anything, could be done to turn this around. To demonstrate how hard this is going to be, Beason said the only proposal he's responded to was an idea to spread giant tarps over Mount Rainier's glaciers in the summer months.
"Our answer on that one was pretty easy," Beason laughed. "It was 'No. We aren't putting tarps over the mountain.' "
It would give a whole new angle, though, to that old nickname "blue tarp Seattle."
It isn't as crazy as it sounds. In Switzerland they have an ongoing project to save melting glaciers by covering them with tarps or white blankets. Other countries have been propping up melting glaciers by adding snow with machines.
A California company called the Arctic Ice Project (it used to be called Ice911 Research) has come up with a longshot idea of spreading tiny glass beads across the ice to deflect some of the sun's rays.
All these geoengineering solutions theoretically could work. (Beason's paper describes how some of Rainier's glaciers have melted more slowly because avalanches dumped insulating layers of debris on top of them.)
But they also convey the desperation of the moment. This is what we've come to — tarps? Glass beads? At best it'd be a Hail Mary to bide time until the world gets around to the root of the issue. At worst it's what's been dubbed "disaster capitalism," a form of techno-denial that we can fix the effects of climate change.
"You can maybe save an individual glacier with tarps or snow-making machines," Pelto said. "But the scale of what's happening is just too big."
"It's a very large area of ice to protect up here," Beason echoed. "There isn't going to be a practical way to intervene. We've really got to focus on how we emit carbon into the air."
The scientists say people should also go see the changing glaciers for themselves. Maybe view the immensity of these massive ice rivers, and their visible retreat right outside Seattle, as a signal.
You're not likely to leave thinking this a problem we can tarp over.
