Hubbard Glacier north of Yakutat crept to within
100 yards of Gilbert Point in June of 2007.
George Kalli took this photo in May 2007.
This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.
As you read this, a rogue glacier is again threatening a small town.
Hubbard Glacier crept to within a football-field distance of ramming into Gilbert Point last June, and some scientists say that a spring 2008 closure of Russell Fiord “may be eminent.”
Roman Motyka, a research professor with the University of Alaska Southeast and the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, gives Hubbard a 50-50 chance of plugging the entrance to Russell Fiord this spring.
Hubbard Glacier dips its tongue into salt water about 40 miles north of Yakutat, Alaska, home to about 600 people. Fed by fields of ice so immense that the glacier will rumble forward regardless of how warm the planet gets in the near future, Hubbard Glacier made headlines in 2002 when it bulldozed gravel into Gilbert Point, pinching off Russell Fiord’s link to the sea and creating the largest glacier-dammed lake in the world. Before the gravel dam broke, water within the lake rose more than eight inches each day and threatened to spill into a world-class steelhead stream near Yakutat.
Hubbard Glacier has been thickening and advancing since scientists first measured it in 1895. After the glacier dammed the fiord in 1986, the new Russell Lake rose 83 feet above sea level before the ice-and-gravel dam broke.
In 2002, Russell Lake reached 49 feet above sea level before the dam burst and the water rejoined the ocean with a flood 30 percent greater than the largest measured flow of the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge.