GLACIERS OF COLLEGE FJORD Gibbworld Home Page      Global Warming Page        Glacier Home Page

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MANY GLACIERS IN THE SAME PLACE College Fjord is located just off of Alaska's Prince William Sound, which you can see in the map at this link.  Also, look at this satellite image showing the glaciers side by side.  This is on Alaska's southern coast near Whittier. As the name would suggest, the glaciers are named after colleges.  I have labeled many of them in the picture to the right.

Here are some more of the glacier names.  It is a little hard to tell from this picture, but Harvard Glacier and Yale Glacier are each at the end of a separate arm of College Fjord.  That bit of land between them actually extends out quite a distance toward the camera.  Check that satellite image again. Radcliffe Glacier is a tributary glacier of Harvard.  So is Baltimore Glacier.  What would people in those places think of that?

In a closer picture, Yale Glacier shows signs of having pulled back from the water.  These pictures were taken in June, 2007, but it is interesting to compare them with a Sept., 2007 picture.  By September, most of the snow was gone from the mountain tops, but it was close enough to winter then so that the snow was about to come back. Not the glacier, though, which has been retreating at about 50 meters per year (164 feet per year) since 1931.  Glaciers respond to regional climate on much longer timescales than just the transition from winter to summer to winter.  Glacier response can take decades. The next picture (to the left) there is the advancing glacier, Harvard Glacier.  It has been advancing at about 20 meters per year (66 feet per year) since 1931.  The interesting thing is that both are side-by-side, exposed to the same climate.  Not only that, both start in the same snowfield, about 20 miles back.  So, although glaciers do respond to climate, there must also be something else driving the behavior of these glaciers. These are tidewater glaciers, glaciers that end in some body of water connected to the ocean.  For such glaciers, the dynamics of the interaction with the bottom of the body of water seems to influence the motion more than regional climate.  See this NASA site for a brief look at these two glaciers and their dynamics as well as a look at some other glaciers. Go to the bottom of this page for some more discussion of this, largely copied from my page on Hubbard Glacier. While we are at it, have a look at some of the nearby wildlife.  I think these are harbor seals (to the left), but I am not very good at identifying these things.

Continuing on around from Harvard Glacier, we come to Smith Glacier (Right) and Bryn Mawr Glacier (Left).  Notice that each of these shows signs of retreat in the form of bare ground which the glaciers once covered.  That looks like a couple of icefalls, high on each glacier.  That is like a waterfall, except with ice, where the slope gets steep and the ice gets very jumbled as it tumbles down.

Here are the same two glaciers, Bryn Mawr and Smith.  But look how still the water is allowing reflections of the glaciers and mountains behind them.

And, in a rather strange-looking picture, the seals got to look at the reflections, too.

Here, we are continuing on around College Fjord with Vassar Glacier (Right), which has pulled a long way back up the mountain, and Wellesley Glacier (left).  Check the detail in the picture of Wellesley Glacier and the reflections under Vassar Glacier..

And here are some seals, one more time.

So how could some glaciers advance while other glaciers that are nearby are retreating?  For example, Harvard Glacier is advancing while Yale Glacier is retreating, even though they are side-by-side and they originate in the same snowfield.  Most of the other College Fjord glaciers also show signs of having retreated. In general, many (but not all) tidewater glaciers that lose mass by calving are known to defy climate.  Here is a paper that discusses the matter while describing the 2002 closing of Russell Fjord by Hubbard Glacier.  Here is my page on Hubbard Glacier. Such glaciers also calve into unusually shallow water, which seems to make a difference.  The shallow water is often caused by the glacier's terminal moraine -- the sediment and junk dropped by the glacier as it loses its ice.   In general, the condition of the bottom of the fjord can govern how rapidly the glacier does or doesn't grow. This link takes you to the abstract of a similar paper. More discussion at this USGS site.