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It takes a minute to really understand the scale of what's showing in the giant photograph hanging on Andrew Fountain's wall. Is that really a ship? That little tiny thing in the lower left corner?

Indeed it is, and the rest of the photo is taken up with ice: an astronomical mass, almost a landform in itself. Great cubic miles of the stuff creaking and grinding its way through a mountain valley, reaching to the sea and the ship as if to swallow it.

This photo is of the Columbia Glacier in Alaska, taken from a plane in the mid-1980s. Today the ice is gone, having retreated back into the mountains, out of view of most cameras.

This same phenomenon is playing out at hundreds of mountain locations all over the world, says Fountain, associate professor of geology and geography. The glaciers of Europe, New Zealand, the Himalayas, Mt. Kilimanjaro, the South American Andes—they're all retreating. The world saw one example of this retreat in 1991 when hikers found the remains of a Bronze Age man poking out of the ice and snow in the Alps that border Austria and Italy. The man had been buried for 5,000 years; the world's climate change brought him out.

"We know that the overall shrinkage is due to climate warming. There's no doubt about that," says Fountain, who is in the second year of a study documenting changes in glaciers of the American West.

The earth is warming. Exactly why it's warming, and the extent to which human activity is contributing to that warming is the subject of constant debate, not only among scientists, but among politicians, industry groups, and environmental organizations as well.

The current warming period can be traced to about 1850. For 400 years before that, the Earth was in a period that scientists named the Little Ice Age. You can see evidence of it in the art and literature of that period. The cold, snowy winters of London that Charles Dickens portrays in his stories may have been common in the 1830s, but certainly not today. Also take a look at Pieter Bruegel's 16th century painting, Hunters in the Snow, in which people are skating as hunters look on. Temperatures today do dip below freezing in Brussels where Bruegel painted. But enough to create ice thick enough for an entire village to play on?

"You just don't see that anymore," Fountain says.

The Earth came out of the Little Ice Age naturally, Fountain says, "but now we're superimposing human effects on top of the naturally warming cycle." Many people engaged in the debate are saying that humans have contributed one degree—or between 25 and 50 percent of the current warming—to the Earth's temperature in the last 50 years.

Sea levels also have risen a few inches in the last century, he says. A third of that rise is due to melting glacial ice, and the rest is due to thermal expansion of seawater. This is a serious potential problem in places such as Micronesia, where a slight rise in sea level can shrink the size of islands and compromise their supplies of fresh water.

The USGS maps of Mt. Hood's Eliot Glacier are incorrect, according to Professor Andrew Fountain, who, through regular measurement, has found the ice field shrinking.

These are not things that humans are conditioned to easily accept.

"We're really good at slow change. But when things change in the course of a decade, it takes a lot of effort to respond," Fountain says."Things can change really fast, and that's what nobody wants."

The business of predicting climate change and all of the consequences that go along with it is tricky. Dire predictions abound and have for quite a while. Fountain points to an article printed in a 1940 newspaper predicting the disappearance of the world's glaciers by the end of the last century.

"Consensus among scientists is hard to come by," says Christina Hulbe, PSU assistant professor and Fountain's colleague. (See "Polar Distress".) "A good way to think about science is that it's a marketplace of ideas. If you get five scientists in a room working on a problem, you get at least eight different ideas."

By the same token, she says, anytime you get a broad consensus among scientists about a particular theory, you can bet that the theory has a lot of validity. But coming to that consensus can take a long time.

"My ideas about global warming have changed a lot over the past 10 years. I used to be unsure whether the burning of fossil fuels was a factor. Now I'm pretty sure that it is," Hulbe says.

The work of Hulbe, Fountain, and scores of other scientists from throughout the world is being synthesized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose most recent report was titled "Climate Change 2001." Among its many findings, the report stated that Greenland's ice is getting thinner on the perimeter and thicker in the center. It's thicker because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and thus can produce more snow. As the planet continues to warm, the scales will tip to greater melting, Hulbe says. The same scenario is playing out in Antarctica.

Fountain likens the glaciers in the Western United States to the proverbial canary in the coal mine: a small indicator of the big picture.

A glacier's life starts with snow. Snow falls in the mountains, it accumulates, and is then replenished with more snow the following winter. One year's accumulation builds on the last, compressing the layers underneath until they become ice. The process repeats itself over many years, and the icy mass becomes ever thicker—in many cases, hundreds of meters thick. Gravity pulls glaciers slowly down the sides of mountains in a process that, over eons, smooths the land surface, turning V-shaped valleys U-shaped.

During the last major ice age, which ended about 15,000 years ago, glaciers covered everything inside the boundaries of Mt. Rainier National Park and extended to the edge of the Puget Sound Basin. It was during this same period that massive glaciers carved out Yosemite Valley, shearing off the sides of granite mountains to create the vertical walls of El Capitan and Half Dome.

The lower elevation fringes of glaciers melt off in the summer. By September, it looks as if the glaciers have retreated back into the higher, colder elevations. Of course, glaciers don't move uphill; they simply shrink. But up until about a century ago, that shrinkage was always reversed in the winter, when fresh accumulations of snow built glaciers back to their previous size—or bigger. The warmer winters of the past 100 years have produced less snow.

"Glaciers are perhaps the clearest expression of climate change," says Fountain.

A collection of old and new photographs that fill his office and appear on a Web site he's put together on the subject all point to the same conclusion: The glacial ice in the Cascades, the Sierra Nevada, and the Rockies is melting faster than it's being replenished.

Take the Eliot Glacier on the northeast flank of Mt. Hood. Old time Mazamas probably remember the glacier as being bigger and extending farther down the mountain 50 years ago. The photographic evidence bears that out: A black-and-white photo from the 1930s shows a much heavier mass of ice than the photo next to it taken more recently.

But you don't have to be particularly old to know that conditions are changing. The U.S. Geological Survey maps that climbers use for scaling the mountain show glaciers that are noticeably larger than they really are. The maps were drawn in the 1960s, Fountain says, and are thus out of date. He uses these maps, which you can buy in most outdoor stores, as historic data, not as accurate pictures of what's actually there.

Side-by-side photos of the Collier Glacier in Oregon's Three Sisters Wilderness, one taken in 1910 and the other in 1993, show the same thing: shrinkage due to decades of warmer winters. Aerial photography helped PSU glaciologist Thomas Nylean determine that glacial volume on Mt. Rainier shrunk by 25 percent between 1913 and 1994. Forty percent of the glacial ice and snow within North Cascades National Park has vanished over the past 150 years.

In fact the only place in the continental United States where you'll find a glacier that is growing in size is Mount St. Helens, according to Fountain. Why? The eruption of 1980 created the perfect snow trap, a steep-side crater facing north, protecting the interior from the warming rays of the sun. Snow and ice are accumulating, but they're starting from scratch.

Fountain collects data and photographs from a variety of sources, and in the summer months he heads for the mountains, to places such as Glacier National Park, to make his own observations. His ultimate goal is to get a clear picture of what is happening in the mountains and, thus, get a better idea of what is happening with the state of the Earth.

"We're always hearing of this changing and that changing. But what we're trying to do is put it all together: linking a lot of small studies so that we can get a continental view of glacier changes and what they might mean for the future," Fountain says.

This is a dream job for Fountain, who, as a boy growing up in upstate New York, became so fascinated with snow and ice that he made a hobby of it. He studied snowflakes under a microscope, and even made a collection of snowflake casts from a chemical kit developed by a local research lab. A friend's father took him ice skating on a lake and pointed out how cracks and bubble patterns formed. He wrote a research paper about lake ice in college, where he learned that he could turn his hobby into a profession.

He remembers thinking, "There are people who get paid to do this!"

Fountain earned his master's and doctorate while working for the USGS. Then he found his way to Portland State, where he has been on faculty since 1998.

He has traveled to Antarctica annually for the last decade to measure changes in that continent's glaciers. Both he and Hulbe have Antarctic glaciers named after them. He also has led research projects in Sweden and Alaska.

But the American West is his primary focus now. His work is funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation and involves students from high school through graduate level. He developed a collaborative relationship with the National Parks Service, which shares archived photos and data with Fountain's team in exchange for digitized copies of the same. He also works closely with the Mazamas, a Portland-based mountain climbing organization that has an extensive collection of old photos.

Glaciers have a story to tell. Fountain's job is to decipher it.

John Kirkland, a Portland freelance writer, wrote the article "Cyprus on the Line" in the fall 2005 PSU Magazine.