🌅 Climate Change Turned a Mountain into an Island

SOURCE

NASA

WHAT TO KNOW

• Satellite images from NASA show Prow Knob, a small mountain in southeastern Alaska that was once surrounded by the Alsek Glacier, is now a roughly two-square-mile island within Alsek Lake. The transformation happened this past summer, when the retreating glacier lost contact with the mountain, completely surrounding it with the meltwater lake.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Alsek Lake is one of several that have formed in recent years as meltwater left behind by Alaska’s rapidly thinning glaciers pools and floods vast regions along its southeastern coastal plain. Experts say the lakes span areas from the mountains to the coast, creating a new lake district unique to the U.S. Since 1984, the Alsek Glacier has retreated—i.e., melted—more than three miles, while Alsek Lake has nearly doubled in size (from 17 square miles to roughly 29 square miles).

CONNECT THE DOTS

• Alaska is home to more than 19,000 glaciers collectively spanning an area the size of West Virginia, however, it’s also warming at a rate two to three times the global average and losing more than 66 billion tons of ice each year. In August, people in Juneau were forced to evacuate when water burst through a glacial ice dam at Mendenhall Glacier, leading to record flooding for the third consecutive year.