The role of glaciers and why we must preserve them.
Shawn Marshall, an Environment and Climate Change Canada research scientist studies glacier-climate processes and glacier hydrology.
The United Nations has proclaimed 2025 as the International Year of Glaciers'Preservation, and World Day for Glaciers will be celebrated every March 21 starting this year. Watch the message from Shawn Marshall, a research scientist from the Science and Technology Branch, who spent nearly two years camping on glaciers in western Canada and the Arctic to study glacier-climate processes and glacier hydrology.
** Transcript **
There are more than 37,000 glaciers in Canada, representing about 26% of global glacier area. This makes Canada the second Iciest country in the world after Greenland. So, we have a lot of snow and ice in Canada. It’s part of our cultural identity and glaciers are a big part of that. They have esthetic and tourist value, but glacier meltwater also feeds into all the major river systems of western Canada.
But glaciers are melting. They're disappearing faster than anyone had foreseen, with implications for our water supplies, aquatic ecosystems. The past decade, glaciers have become the number one driver of global sea level rise. So, I work as a glaciologist. I study glaciers as part of the water cycle and then the global climate system. We make measurements of processes and feedbacks that determine glacial response to climate change to try to understand how fast this is all unfolding.
In recent years, as an example, we've documented the impacts of wildfire on glaciers in western Canada, how charcoal and little bits of burned leaves and pine needles and pine cones are being blown in by the wind and deposited on the glaciers and that darkens the glacier surfaces and accelerates their melting processes. And we still have a lot to learn about this process and others, but it's really important to understand glacier systems in order for us to be better prepared for how climate change is going to impact our water resources and sea level rise in the future decades.