Henry Fountain

“They’ve been here since before we’ve been here,” said Janin Guzman-Morales, a postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s a natural process in this region.”

But the winds’ future in a changing climate is less certain. Recent research by Guzman-Morales and others suggests that as the climate warms, the winds may become less frequent, especially at the fringes of their season in fall and spring.

That is not necessarily good news. Coupled with changes in patterns of precipitation that are also expected to occur as the climate warms, it may mean that California’s wildfire season will shift from fall into winter, with longer and more intense fires later in the year.

Currently, however, most of California’s worst wildfires occur in the fall, when vegetation is driest and the winds start to pick up. The Santa Anas have their origin east of California, in the Great Basin, the high desert that includes much of Nevada and the western half of Utah.

Cold and dry high-pressure air develops over the basin and circulates in a clockwise motion. The air spills into California, over the Sierra Nevada, and, because it is heavier than warmer air, it slides down the slopes. As it descends it becomes compressed and warms significantly, by close to 30 degrees Fahrenheit for every mile of lost elevation. Already dry, it becomes drier still as it warms up.

Traveling downslope, the air also picks up speed. In some places this acceleration is aided by the funneling effect of the air traveling through gaps in the mountains.

All in all, what began as cold, dry, relatively slow-moving air becomes warm, bone-dry, fast-moving air, traveling at speeds approaching 100 mph in extreme cases and drawing more moisture out of already-dry shrubs and trees. In the face of this onslaught, even the smallest bit of burning vegetation can quickly develop into a full-blown wildfire.

Because they start as zones of high-pressure air in the Great Basin, Santa Ana winds can be forecast. The ones that occur in the fall tend to get the most notice, because the fire risk is high. But Santa Anas are actually more active in the wetter winter months, Guzman-Morales said.

In her research, published this year, she and a colleague looked at how the winds would change over the 21st century under various climate models. Overall, they found that warming would weaken the high-pressure systems over the Great Basin and decrease the frequency of Santa Ana events.

But the decrease would not be uniform from October to April, Guzman-Morales said. “It decreases more in the shoulder season,” she said. The winter months will still see significant Santa Ana activity.

That could mean a later wildfire season, she said, as independent studies have shown that precipitation patterns in California will shift with warming: rains would most likely come later in the season. So a strong Santa Ana might occur in a relatively dry December, leading to wildfires.

“The window for wildfires is expanding toward winter,” Guzman-Morales said.

Californians already have a sense of what this future might be like. In 2017, winter winds came late, and December was still relatively dry. Santa Ana winds fueled the Thomas fire, a huge wildfire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties that began on Dec. 4 and burned for more than a month.

This article originally appeared in

Climate Change Could Shift California's Winds, Fueling Big Winter Fires

For centuries, humans have experienced the fierce, hot and dry winds that are fanning California’s recent spate of wildfires. Known as Santa Anas in the southern part of the state and Diablos in the north, they arrive regularly in the fall.

European climate researchers said Monday that last month was the hottest July — and thus the hottest month — ever recorded, slightly eclipsing the previous record-holder, July 2016. “While July is usually the warmest month of the year for the globe, according to our data it also was the warmest month recorded globally, by a very small margin,” Jean-Noël Thépaut, head of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement.

The service, part of an intergovernmental organization supported by European countries, said the global average temperature last month was about 0.07 degree Fahrenheit (0.04 Celsius) hotter than July 2016.

The researchers noted that their finding was based on analysis of only one of several data sets compiled by agencies around the world.

Analyses by other agencies, including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States, will be released over the next several weeks and could be slightly different.

But whatever its ultimate ranking, last month is part of a long-term trend: As human-related emissions of greenhouse gases have continued, the atmosphere has continued to warm. The past five years have been the hottest on record, including the record single year in 2016. The 10 hottest years have all occurred in the past two decades.

This June was the warmest on record, and the previous five months were among the four warmest for their respective months, the climate researchers said. That puts this year on track to be in the top five, or perhaps the hottest ever.

“With continued greenhouse-gas emissions and the resulting impact on global temperatures, records will continue to be broken in the future,” Thépaut said.

The climate service noted some regional temperature differences in July. Western Europe was above average, in part because of a heat wave that occurred during the last week of the month and set temperature records in Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere. A rapid analysis released last week found that climate change made the heat wave more likely.

The highest above-average conditions were recorded across Alaska, Greenland and large swathes of Siberia. Large parts of Africa and Australia were warmer than normal, as was much of Central Asia. Cooler than average temperatures prevailed in Eastern Europe, much of Asia, the Northern Plains and Pacific Northwest of the United States and over large parts of Western Canada.

The year 2016 was a record-setter in part because the world had just been through a strong El Niño. During an El Niño there are changes in sea temperature, atmospheric pressure and winds in the equatorial Pacific that can influence regional weather patterns around the world and lead to short-term variations in temperature. The world experienced a weak El Niño earlier this year and further weakening has occurred. It is not clear what, if any, effect this has had on temperatures.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/climate/july-hottest-month-climate.html" id="68dc6151-7aa1-313b-aa8c-d5edb9e033ac">The New York Times</a>.

How Hot Was July? Hotter Than Ever, Global Data Shows

With temperatures soaring in Europe and Alaska, ice melting in Greenland and forests burning across Siberia, last month seemed like a blistering one worldwide.

The announcement signals at least a temporary victory for environmental groups and scientists who oppose the project, in which large trucks and other heavy equipment would crisscross the refuge’s coastal plain along the Arctic Ocean, using acoustic signals to map underground rock formations that may hold oil and gas reserves.

Steve Wackowski, the department’s senior adviser for Alaska affairs, made the announcement at a hearing Tuesday in Kaktovik, a village within the refuge.

Faith Vander Voort, a department spokeswoman, said the seismic proposal was still pending, and that the company behind it, SAExploration, had asked that the start date be moved to next December.

The postponement will have no direct impact on the Interior Department’s plan to open the coastal plain, 1.5 million acres known as the 1002 Area, to oil and gas development. The department, through the Bureau of Land Management, has said it wants to offer leases for sale this year.

The coastal plain is thought to overlie formations containing billions of barrels of oil, and the Trump administration has been eager to allow development, part of its push for more commercial activities on federal lands.

But the decision means that oil companies that bid on the leases will have to do so without the benefit of new data on potential reserves. The only seismic studies in the refuge were done three decades ago, using less-effective technology. An exploratory well, the only one in the refuge, was drilled around the same time, and its results have remained secret.

Opponents of the seismic plan have argued that the work would harm polar bears and other wildlife and leave indelible scars on the delicate tundra in the refuge, a vast, largely unspoiled wilderness in the northeastern part of the state.

But the Bureau of Land Management and SAExploration have said that new seismic technology has little permanent impact on the landscape. The company says it is working with federal wildlife officials on steps to be taken to minimize harm to wildlife.

The seismic project is a joint venture with two Alaska Native corporations. Officials from SAExploration could not be reached for comment.

The Sierra Club — which, with members of the Gwich’in community, Native Alaskans who live near the refuge, had organized a campaign to oppose the seismic work — hailed the decision. “This is a major victory in the fight to protect this special and sacred place,” Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director, said in a statement. “We will not back down until it is permanently protected.”

Democrats have blocked proposals to open the refuge for decades, but in 2017, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress approved a plan to allow oil and gas development there. A draft environmental impact statement on the leasing plan was issued in December and is expected to be finalized this year, allowing the sales to proceed.

Separately, last spring, SAExploration filed its proposal and aimed to have trucks rolling into the refuge by late last year. The work can only be done in winter, when there is sufficient snow cover to allow travel on the tundra.

The Bureau of Land Management conducted an environmental assessment of the proposed project — a less rigorous evaluation than an environmental impact statement — and another Interior agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, worked with the company on regulating how much disturbance or harm to wildlife would be allowed.

All that work has taken longer than expected, however. The assessment and the regulations have not been made public, which means the seismic work could not have begun until mid-March at the earliest. That would have left two months or less for the work before the snow disappeared.

The decision was first reported by KTOO Public Media in Alaska.

Environmentalists and scientists had criticized the Bureau of Land Management for refraining from a more rigorous appraisal of the potential impact of the seismic work.

The critics argued that under the National Environmental Policy Act, the umbrella legislation that governs environmental reviews, the effects of seismic studies on the tundra and wildlife could be enough to warrant a fuller environmental impact statement, especially considering the significance of the refuge.

The Bureau of Land Management said there had been previous thorough environmental studies of the refuge. Because the seismic assessment could make use of those, a more rigorous evaluation was not needed, it said.

Critics said they were especially concerned about the harm that could be done to the southern Beaufort Sea subpopulation of polar bears, which has been declining in numbers as climate change has reduced sea ice in the region. More of the bears are making winter dens — in which pregnant females give birth to cubs — in snow drifts on the coastal plain.

Steven C. Amstrup, chief scientist of the conservation group Polar Bears International, said the risk to the bears was that seismic trucks, which weigh up to 45 tons, could come close to or ride over dens, forcing the bears outside prematurely or even injuring or killing them.

The Bureau of Land Management said precautions would be taken to identify and avoid dens, including the use of infrared sensing that can detect the warm bears in their frigid surroundings.

But Amstrup said his research showed that such techniques would not detect all dens. The seismic work, he said, “has the potential of impacting 50 percent of dens in the most important denning area.”

SAExploration’s proposal calls for trucks to roll across the tundra in grid lines roughly 200 yards apart, sending acoustic signals deep into the earth to assess the location of any oil or gas deposits.

The trucks have rubber caterpillar treads designed to minimize the impact on the fragile landscape. They would be accompanied by two “man camps” holding up to 160 workers each, along with fuel tanks and other equipment for the work.

Opponents have said that even with the steps taken to minimize damage, the seismic work could have lasting effects on the fragile landscape, compressing the tundra and potentially altering vegetation types and the flow of water.

They point out that there are still signs of the seismic work undertaken in the area in the mid-1980s. And work by a Fairbanks-based digital mapping expert last summer found evidence of damage by seismic trucks that operated just west of the refuge in April.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/climate/seismic-testing-anwr-alaska.html" id="fd2b0c40-a390-39ce-a608-a49318dce3c2">The New York Times</a>.

Tests for Oil in Arctic Refuge Won't Happen This Winter, Officials Say

A plan to conduct seismic testing for oil and gas exploration across a large swath of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska has been shelved for this winter, Interior Department officials have said.

The four possible plans, which would determine what parts of the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could be opened to drilling, were included in a draft environmental report prepared by the Bureau of Land Management.

After a 45-day public comment period, the bureau is expected to select one of the alternatives and approve a final report early next summer. If the process survives expected court challenges by environmental and conservation groups, as well as efforts by the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives to slow it down, lease sales for rights to drill for oil and gas could be held before the end of 2019.

Oil company exploration and development plans would require additional studies and approvals, however, so any actual drilling could be a decade or more away.

The draft report, called an environmental-impact statement, was issued exactly a year after Congress approved legislation opening the refuge to oil and gas development. “We have undertaken a rigorous effort here,” said Joe Balash, an assistant Interior secretary.

Balash, who oversees the bureau, said each of the four proposed alternatives had “built-in protections” for the coastal plain, known as the 1002 Area, where the migrating porcupine caribou herd goes to give birth. Of the alternatives, two would exclude one-third of the 1.5 million acres of the coastal plain from any lease sales, while the other two would have no exclusions. In all four, some acreage would be subject to operating restrictions.

Balash said the department did not have a preferred alternative. “We’re going to wait and see what kind of feedback we get,” he said.

Environmental groups have warned that drilling could harm wildlife in one of the most undisturbed landscapes in the United States. They say the Interior Department is rushing to finish the environmental impact statement because it is determined to sell leases before the 2020 presidential election, when a Democrat could take the White House.

“This isn’t a legitimate effort to look at how to avoid impacts,” said Adam Kolton, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League. “This is a race against a political clock, to get leases before a new administration takes office.”

Objections have also been raised by a Native group that lives south of the refuge, the Gwich’in, which has spiritual ties to the caribou and counts on them for much of their food. “This administration has absolutely no regard to the harm this development will inflict on my people, the impact it will have on wildlife and the environment, and definitely not what it will mean for our climate,” said Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee.

But many Alaskans favor drilling in the state, and Natives who live in the coastal plain, such as the Inupiat, generally support oil development.

A separate, and less rigorous, environmental review of a proposal to conduct seismic surveys in the coastal plain to pinpoint oil and gas reserves is still not complete, Balash said. Lessening any potential effect on polar bears of that work, which involves heavy trucks traversing the tundra, is causing the delay, he said.

Some scientists and conservation groups have expressed concerns that the seismic work could cause lasting damage to the tundra as well as harm the bears, which are part of a population that is already declining largely because of the effects of climate change on sea ice.

Balash said that more than 70 scientists and specialists “across governments” had worked on the environmental impact statement. But current and former employees of the Fish and Wildlife Service, another Interior agency, have said the process of preparing the statement created friction, with some personnel with the Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, feeling marginalized as the Bureau of Land Management oversaw the process.

The move to open the coastal plain to oil and gas development is a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s efforts to increase domestic production of fossil fuels while at the same time doing away with policies, many from the Obama administration, that protect the environment and help curb global warming.

The refuge, in the northeastern part of the state on the Beaufort Sea, was created in 1960 and expanded in 1980 to 19 million acres. It is a vast roadless tract, home to migrating birds, the large nomadic porcupine caribou herd and the winter dens of pregnant polar bears.

For four decades, Democrats thwarted efforts to open the area to oil and gas development even as other nearby lands on Alaska’s North Slope were the scene of an oil boom. But with the election of President Donald Trump, Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress saw an opening, inserting language in the 2017 tax bill that framed the issue as a way to raise revenue for the Treasury. That bill passed on a party-line vote on Dec. 20 last year.

The administration moved quickly to develop the plan, holding hearings in Alaska and Washington in May. In keeping with a 2017 Interior Department directive that called for even the most complex environmental impact statements to be finished within a year and be no longer than 300 pages, the Bureau of Land Management aimed to have the environmental impact statement completed by next spring.

That directive was issued by the deputy interior secretary, David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist who is seen as a candidate to replace Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke when he departs at the end of the year.

Environmental groups and some former Interior Department officials criticized the accelerated timetable, saying it potentially gave short shrift to science and relied on earlier studies that may be outdated, particularly since climate change is rapidly affecting the Arctic.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/climate/alaska-anwr-oil-drilling-proposal.html" id="7ed68093-0717-37d8-ab03-4fee7ef918e2">The New York Times</a>.

he Interior Department on Thursday took a key step toward allowing oil and gas drilling in a pristine wildlife refuge in Arctic Alaska, putting forth a range of proposals that the department said would protect the animals there.

Interior Dept. Moves Toward Selling Oil Leases in Arctic Refuge

The Interior Department on Thursday took a key step toward allowing oil and gas drilling in a pristine wildlife refuge in Arctic Alaska, putting forth a range of proposals that the department said would protect the animals there.

The draft report, called an environmental-impact statement, was issued exactly a year after Congress approved legislation opening the refuge to oil and gas development. “We have undertaken a rigorous effort here,” said Joe Balash, an assistant interior secretary.

Even some House Republicans criticized the process. In a letter to the departing interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and six colleagues urged whoever replaces him to conduct a more thorough review of the leasing program.

That directive was issued by the deputy interior secretary, David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist who is seen as a candidate to replace Zinke when he departs at the end of the year.

The Interior Department on Thursday took a key step toward allowing oil and gas drilling in a pristine wildlife refuge in Arctic Alaska, putting forth proposals it said would protect the animals there but that would end decades of environmental protections.

Drilling in Refuge Is a Small Step Closer to Reality

The explosion and fire at Chernobyl’s Unit 4 reactor April 26, 1986, was an extraordinarily messy and grim event, a radioactive “dirty” bomb on a scale that no one — certainly not anyone in the Soviet Union — was prepared for. It remains the worst disaster in the history of nuclear power, killing more than 30 people initially (and more in the years that followed, though the numbers are much disputed) and spreading radioactive contamination across large swaths of Soviet and European territory.

In the immediate panicked aftermath, and in the months of crisis and confusion until the completion seven months later of the concrete-and-steel sarcophagus that entombed the reactor’s lethal remains, the heroes and villains numbered in the hundreds, and the supporting cast in the hundreds of thousands.

The producers of the miniseries don’t sanitize the disaster (sometimes the gore even goes a little too far: The radiation victims are often covered in blood for some reason). Instead, they simplify. They leave the grim alone, but the demands of Hollywood, and of production budgets, take a toll on the messy.

That’s not to say there aren’t many touches of verisimilitude. The rooftop scene in which conscripts have just seconds to toss radioactive debris to the ground is as otherworldly as it must have seemed to those who were there three decades ago. And the Unit 4 control room is faithfully re-created, from the control-rod dials on the walls to the white coats and caps worn by the operators. (When I visited the adjacent Unit 3 control room five years ago, I had to wear the same odd outfit, which seemed more appropriate for a bakery than a nuclear power plant.)

But if you didn’t know much about Chernobyl you could be forgiven if, after watching, you thought the entire response and cleanup was run by two people, Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina, aided valiantly by a third, Ulana Khomyuk.

You could also be forgiven if you thought they were all real characters. Legasov and Shcherbina were real, though their roles were twisted and amplified to meet the script’s need to keep things moving. Khomyuk, on the other hand, was made out of whole cloth, and her actions strain credulity, from traveling to Chernobyl, uninvited, to investigate the accident to being in the presence of Mikhail Gorbachev at the Kremlin not much later.

The producers mention some folderol at the end, that Khomyuk was a composite character created to represent all of the scientists who helped investigate the disaster. Fine, I guess. But much of the rest of “Chernobyl” gets the simplistic Hollywood treatment, too.

There are the brave, doomed firefighters, ignorant of the radiation hazards they encountered (though nobody climbed up over the reactor debris, as portrayed in the series; they were working the roof to prevent fires from spreading to the undamaged Unit 3). The plucky, can-do miners, brought in to excavate under the reactor to stop the meltdown, stripping naked to get the job done (the series doesn’t say this, but their work ended up largely for naught). The no-nonsense helicopter pilots, risking radiation sickness to drop their loads of lead, boron and sand on the reactor (while one helicopter did crash, killing its crew, the accident happened months later, and radiation had nothing to do with it).

I could go on. Don’t get me started about that blue light from the exposed reactor shining high into the night sky in the first episode. Yes, nuclear reactors can produce a blue hue, from something called Cherenkov radiation, but no, there’s no way Unit 4 would have looked like the “Tribute in Light” in Lower Manhattan on the anniversary of Sept. 11.

In the end, though, none of this really matters. For the miniseries gets a basic truth right — that the Chernobyl disaster was more about lies, deceit and a rotting political system than it was about bad engineering or abysmal management and training (or, for that matter, about whether nuclear power is inherently good or bad).

“Chernobyl” is grim only partly because of all the destruction and death. The need to constantly lie (or cope with the lies of higher-ups) weighs on its characters as heavily as all the lead that was dropped on the reactor.

Yes, this basic truth is simplified, too, especially in the final episode, which portrays the trial of three power plant officials.

I don’t want to give away much about these scenes, though I will reveal that the geeky term “positive void coefficient” — one of the reactor’s design flaws — was uttered. (As a science writer, I was overjoyed.)

The scenes have a lot of tension, and are among the best in the whole miniseries. But they seem drawn more from American movie courtrooms than from Soviet jurisprudence. The idea of someone speaking truth to power in this court seems about as far-fetched as anything else in the whole of “Chernobyl.”

How the show gets to its truth, however, is less important than that it gets there. Viewers may come away from “Chernobyl” realizing that, together, people and machines can do awful things — like create a nuclear catastrophe for the ages. If they also come away understanding that in this case, that outcome was more the fault of a government and its apparatchiks, so much the better.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/arts/television/chernobyl-hbo.html" id="d37e6a58-6d3b-3c88-a9de-0776e5ebb013">The New York Times</a>.

The first thing to understand about the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl,” which concludes its five-part run Monday, is that a lot of it is made up. But here’s the second, and more important, thing: It doesn’t really matter.

Getting a nuclear disaster right, mostly

The ice cream stand is long gone, and so is the ice. The glacier now ends more than a mile farther up the mountain.

As surely as they are melting elsewhere around the world, glaciers are disappearing in North America, too.

This great melting will affect ecosystems and the creatures within them, like the salmon that spawn in meltwater streams. This is on top of the effects on the water that billions of people drink, the crops they grow and the energy they need.

Glacier-fed ecosystems are delicately balanced, populated by species that have adapted to the unique conditions of the streams. As glaciers shrink and meltwater eventually declines, changes in water temperature, nutrient content and other characteristics will disrupt those natural communities.

“Lots of these ecosystems have evolved with the glaciers for thousands of years or maybe longer,” said Jon Riedel, a geologist with the National Park Service who has established glacier monitoring programs at Rainier and other parks. “We’re pulling this thing apart but we don’t really understand the impacts.”

Among the researchers trying to understand the disruptions is J. Ryan Bellmore, a biologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Juneau, Alaska. He studies freshwater food webs, the complex what-eats-what relationships that show, in effect, how energy moves through an ecosystem. Often that involves examining the stomach contents of fish.

Alaska is an ideal place to study the effects of climate change on glaciers, since there are thousands of them and overall they are losing some 75 billion tons of ice every year. As the ice melts it leaves an altered landscape, and the water that runs through the landscape changes as well.

One day late last fall, Bellmore and a colleague set fish traps in the Herbert River, about 10 miles north of the center of Juneau. The river meanders for a few miles from the glacier of the same name to its outlet on the coast.

After weighing and measuring each fish, they performed a delicate task called gastric lavage. By carefully sticking the thin tip of a plastic syringe down the throat of each fish and injecting water, Bellmore was able to flush the stomachs of their contents. The food, nearly intact flies and lots of unrecognizable detritus, was put in bags for thorough inspection and cataloging later. (The fish were eventually returned to the river, apparently no worse for the wear.)

Bellmore wants to know how what fish eat in the Herbert, a river that consists almost entirely of glacial meltwater, compared to what they eat in other nearby rivers where the flow comes from other sources. Water temperatures differ depending on the source, as do concentrations and types of nutrients and the clarity or cloudiness of the water. All of that has a bearing on the type of food available and the overall health of the ecosystem.

Studying food webs in different kinds of streams will lead to a better understanding of what will happen as glaciers like the Herbert continue to retreat and meltwater flows eventually decline, replaced by water from other sources.

“As glaciers recede, glacial streams may look more like snowmelt streams, or rainfall streams,” Bellmore said. “What unique characteristics are going to go away when we lose these glacial streams?”

One thing that may be lost are specialized communities of organisms. Streams that are mostly fed by glacial meltwater often have unique species adapted to the cold conditions. Reducing or eventually eliminating the contribution of this meltwater will raise stream temperatures. Even a small temperature increase can have potentially negative effects.

“Certain species like cold water,” said Alexander Milner, a professor of river ecosystems at the University of Birmingham, in England, who has studied the changes wrought by shrinking glaciers for years. “When the glaciers disappear, those species will go extinct.”

Milner was talking about small creatures like insects or even microorganisms like bacteria. The effects on larger species like salmon and other fish may be more complex — and, in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, of more pressing concern.

“In this part of the world salmon are just really important for economies and cultures,” said Jonathan Moore, an ecologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. With other researchers in the United States and Canada, Moore has formed a group to more closely study the links between salmon and melting ice.

Salmon and similar fish are born in freshwater streams, then head to sea to grow, often for years, before returning to fresh water to spawn and die. Water temperatures must be just right for salmon to develop, so, as glacial meltwater declines and stream temperatures rise, populations may be affected.

But other changes may be beneficial, at least for a while. As glaciers retreat, they leave boulders, gravel and sediment, and streams running around them. The gravel beds and meanders can be ideal places for salmon to lay their eggs during spawning season.

In some places there may be huge gains in salmon habitat, said Kara Pitman, a Simon Fraser doctoral student in the group who is modeling how and where habitat increases as glaciers shrink. In some areas of British Columbia, she said, “in 25 or 50 years, watersheds may be full of salmon.”

But overall, the gains might not be so great, given the other changes affecting the fish. “It’s more that salmon populations could be redistributing,” colonizing new areas and abandoning others, she said. “Salmon do have an amazing ability to adjust and adapt.”

“We’re trying to understand the new opportunities for salmon,” Moore said, “but fully acknowledge that climate change overall is not good for salmon in most places.”

The melting that leads to habitat changes for salmon can happen over years or decades. But shrinking glaciers can also lead to floods or debris flows that can alter streambeds in an instant. Many of the rivers and creeks in Mount Rainier National Park, for instance, have been hit by floods over the years.

The natural history of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and of other parts of the world with glaciers, can be seen as a story of disruption caused by ice, slowly or quickly.

It happened in the past, during the last ice age, when the movement of the huge ice sheets that covered much of the planet reshaped the land. And it’s happening today, as glaciers, the remnants of those ice sheets, retreat.

This article originally appeared in <a id="a2a1f438-e5fc-3090-affe-87e230ba9caa" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/climate/when-the-glaciers-disappear-those-species-will-go-extinct.html">The New York Times</a>.

'When the Glaciers Disappear, Those Species Will Go Extinct'

MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK, Wash. — When it was built in the early 1900s, the road into Mount Rainier National Park from the west passed near the foot of the Nisqually Glacier, one of the mountain’s longest. Visitors could stop for ice cream at a stand built among the glacial boulders and gaze in awe at the ice.

'When the glaciers disappear, those species will go extinct'

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Henry Fountain

Articles written by the author

Climate Change Could Shift California's Winds, Fueling Big Winter Fires

How Hot Was July? Hotter Than Ever, Global Data Shows

Tests for Oil in Arctic Refuge Won't Happen This Winter, Officials Say

Interior Dept. Moves Toward Selling Oil Leases in Arctic Refuge

Interior Dept. Moves Toward Selling Oil Leases in Arctic Refuge

Drilling in Refuge Is a Small Step Closer to Reality

Getting a nuclear disaster right, mostly

'When the glaciers disappear, those species will go extinct'