Glacier Seals Fiord : Advancing Ice Alters Ecology of Alaska Town

The word came back with the moose hunters last February: While stalking their prey along Nunatak Fiord, they had heard loud, ominous sounds coming from the Hubbard Glacier 33 miles northeast of here.

Something was happening.

Now, barely six months later, the Hubbard Glacier has advanced so fast and so far that it has set in motion stunning geologic change that is slowly but surely altering the land and waters of this Alaska panhandle community.

Bay Becomes Lake

Already, the Hubbard has sealed off Russell Fiord, changing a saltwater bay into a lake that is gradually filling with freshwater.

The advance of the Hubbard is a change that has offered modern science an unprecedented glimpse into one of the many forces that shape the earth. “We have not looked carefully at an example of an advancing tidewater glacier,” said Larry Mayo of the U.S. Geological Survey.

“This is one of the first looks at what goes on--at what happens when they advance.”

The advance of the Hubbard is also threatening the fragile existence of Yakutat and its 600 or so people, whose lives are dependent on the fishery and timber resources jeopardized by the reshaping of the Hubbard, the third-largest glacier in North America.

Lake May Spill Over

The rapidly rising Russell Lake--as the fiord has been renamed--eventually may spill over the broad, flat coastal lands that nurture a salmon fishery and stands of timber.

“The level of concern is pretty profound,” said Yakutat’s mayor, Larry Powell. “Everybody here lives off the land--fishing, timbering, guiding, working at the cannery. We’re very closely tied to fishing and timber activity.”

Meanwhile, a handful of volunteers are making a desperate attempt to rescue dozens of seals and porpoises trapped in Russell Lake and endangered by the rapid loss of their saltwater habitat.

It is a rescue effort that has caused bitterness in Yakutat among those who believe that more is being done to help the animals than the people. The native Tlingits hunt the seals for food and prize their livers as delicacies.

“Save the seals,” said Fred Henry, 42, whose great-grandfather was the Tlingit chief Situk Harry, “but save me the liver. I’d like to get more attention focused on the plight of the people. The fishermen are going to be on hard times.”

Henry and others fear that an overflow from Russell Lake will form a broad, rapidly running system of rivers that will scour out and destroy the Situk River, a salmon spawning area so productive that it attracts fishermen from around the world.

This is not the first time the Hubbard Glacier has advanced from the St. Elias Mountains; it’s just the first time that modern settlers have been in its path.

Ice Has Been Mobile

The Hubbard has made perhaps 10 major advances and and retreats since the last Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago. Indeed, Yakutat itself is built on the terminal moraine--the debris an advancing glacier bulldozes ahead of it--left by movement of the Hubbard during the Dark Ages, 700 to 1,000 years ago.

In about 1700, the glacier advanced perhaps halfway down Yakutat Bay, toward the Gulf of Alaska. “It’s continuing that cyclical behavior,” said Mayo, who is project chief of Alaska glacier research at the Geological Survey in Fairbanks.

For the last century, Mayo says, the glacier has been observed moving forward, but in 1971 it began a rapid advance, and this summer was virtually racing ahead at a rate of more than 100 feet a day. Today, it is moving nearly 20 feet daily.

About June 1, this advance of the Hubbard exacted its most profound change yet: The glacier and its rocky moraine pinched off Russell Fiord from Disenchantment Bay, creating a lake that has risen more than 70 feet as it trapped the runoff from the scores of nearby mountain glaciers melting in the summer sun.

Freshwater Collecting Fast

Russell Lake continues to rise by several inches a day, collecting an ever-deepening layer of freshwater on top of several hundred feet of saltwater.

At perhaps 185 feet above sea level, the lake is expected to spill into Old Situk Creek and the Situk River. “We’re going to lose all the spawning areas for the steelhead, the coho and the king salmon,” said Henry, a commercial troller and charter skipper who also fishes for subsistence.

In a place where milk costs $7 a gallon, subsistence fishing is critical to many families.

“We’re going to lose a lot of spawning ground,” he says. “When that lake comes down the river, a lot of those fry (immature fish) are going to be swept out to sea or suffocated. This is our food source, our livelihood. People in this town are tied to that river.

“They’ve been born out there, they’ve died out there, they’ve gotten married out there. Life here all has to do with the fish in the river. It all goes back to that.”

Federal Role Criticized

“It’s going to get at the heart of any community--the culture, the traditions and the livelihood and well-being of the community,” said Mayor Powell. He added that federal agencies have been slow to develop plans for preventing loss of the Situk fishery and timberlands. Powell and others here would like to see a canal built to carry the new lake’s waters away from the Situk, even though such a project would itself involve some environmental disruption.

“There isn’t adequate preparation for it,” he said, arguing for a diversionary canal to preserve the Situk, which runs just east of here. “We’ve almost burnt so much time this summer just getting started--it would be nigh to impossible to divert the water” if the lake should begin overflowing early next year, a worst-case projection.

Other estimates are that Russell Lake will begin spilling into the Situk as late as two years from now.

“I have no desire to create a destructive channel,” said Powell, “but it would be more beneficial than letting it scour out and reduce the productivity of the Situk River system. We’re forced to do one or the other.”

Bay Will Be Closed

For now, there is hope that Russell Lake will spill over the glacial dam of the Hubbard at less than 100 feet above sea level. “We don’t know who’s going to win the race--the ice dam or the runoff (water),” said Mayo, “but in the long-term--10, 15 years--undoubtedly the glacier will win. As it moves ahead, it will reach a thickness with complete closure (of the lake from Disenchantment Bay) in a few years.”

Outside attention thus far has been focused on the efforts to save the marine mammals trapped behind Hubbard Glacier in an increasingly hostile freshwater environment. Scores of seals and a dozen or so porpoises were in the fiord when it became a lake.

It is an effort that is earnest but perhaps quixotic as well, and one that is seen here as misguided.

“We believe the rescue effort is ludicrous,” said Henry. “We’re amused without smiling. All the money, all the effort, all the time is wasted. Mother Nature takes its course. It’s Mother Nature. I don’t think this much effort would be put into rescuing cows in a snowstorm, and we look at seals as a food source, like a cow.”

But at the scene, along what is now the Nunatak Arm of Russell Lake, the rescue work is viewed as but a small effort to offset man’s killing of marine mammals.

Greenpeace View Told

“Nature also strands a lot of whales on the beach, and we pull them back out,” said Pat Herron, 35, a Greenpeace member working to save trapped porpoises. “Here we have the chance to do the same thing--to help a species survive even more--and man has been giving them hassles with netting and shooting them.

“This is our chance to give back.”

As he spoke, Herron prepared nets that he hoped would help the two dozen or so rescuers trap porpoises and return them to the sea. “I see people’s point, that it’s nature taking its course,” he said, “but if we can help any number of animals, that’s what we’re here for.”

The rescue effort is being sponsored by the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, Wash., and the California Marine Mammal Center in Saulsalito, Calif. The two groups have raised about $30,000 to press their cause.

On Friday, a small flotilla of inflatable boats set out in search of the porpoises to be herded into Herron’s nets. At least 12 could be seen swimming toward the nets stretched across the Nunatak, but they dove deep and apparently swam back under the boats, avoiding the nets.

Porpoises ‘Look Healthy’

“They looked healthy,” said David Kennedy, a Whale Museum board member. “They looked in pretty good shape. All things considered, we’re encouraged.”

The day before, the rescuers had helped eight stranded seals cross the moraine of Hubbard Glacier to open water, and Kennedy said that the group would try to help other seals, but would not try to capture them for transfer back to the sea.

It is not known how long the environmentalists will work to save the seals and porpoises from the inevitable geologic change that is occurring here.

“This is not a temporary situation,” Mayo, the geologist, said of the cyclical advance of the Hubbard, which eventually will be followed by retreat and the return of Russell Lake to Russell Fiord. “We are in the process of a relatively permanent change . . . in terms of many future generations of people.

“And then they’ll be worried as hell that they’re losing a beautiful freshwater lake that feeds the Situk River.”