John Pomeroy had only been back in Canmore, Alta., for two weeks, returning from a research trip in Tibet, when he heard the news of a glacier collapse in Nepal. 

The director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for Hydrology has been working non-stop ever since, trying to make sense of what happened. 

“It’s just horrific,” Pomeroy said. 

When he saw the magnitude of the disaster, Pomeroy immediately made contact with his Nepalese colleagues to assist with analysis. 

As of Sept. 1, when The Narwhal last spoke with Pomeroy, he said the team believes that years of warm temperatures, a particularly warm, wet summer and thawing permafrost led rock to fracture. The rock combined with glacier ice to form an avalanche of debris, on top of releasing a large volume of meltwater which had been stored in the glacier. The torrent of debris immediately formed a wave of destruction.

More than 1,000 people are dead and thousands more are missing. 

“It was very, very fast,” said Pomeroy, who is also a UNESCO chair in mountain water sustainability. 

Early warning systems weren’t capable of giving enough time, Pomery explained. It wasn’t until later when officials could see water levels rising — a precursor to the tsunami that was coming, that a flood warning could be issued downstream. 

“It looks like a lot of the warnings came from the local communities,” Pomeroy said. “They got messages out that the wave was coming to the next [communities] downstream before communications were wiped out.”

The team was monitoring three lakes that had formed since the impact, which were at risk of breaking and causing further flooding. Pomeroy said the lower lake caused high flows on Friday, leading to evacuation.

While that flow has subsided, there’s still danger from the two remaining lakes, Pomeroy explained. 

“It’s not safe yet,” he said. “And this glacier is still very unstable and more could break apart.”

While Pomeroy has research collaborations in Tibet focused on the problems associated with a warming climate, much of his research is focused in Canada, which is home to more than 30,000 glaciers. 

Pomeroy and upwards of 20 students and technicians study mountain glaciers, snow and hydrology from the University of Saskatchewan’s Coldwater Laboratory in Canmore, Alta.

He wants people to know that what’s happening with glaciers in Canada, and globally, is about so much more. It’s about the cryosphere — everything that’s frozen, from permafrost, to glaciers, to snow and ice caps. 

The Narwhal spoke with Pomeroy over the phone to learn more about what’s happening with our glaciers and what, if anything, we can do about it. 

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Glaciers seem to fly under the radar here. There are events happening related to glaciers in Canada and they don’t really get a lot of attention.

I agree, we don’t tend to have communities right under a glacier in most places, like they do in Switzerland or Nepal or the Andes. But we do have many, many glaciers. We have more glaciers than any other country.

We’ve lost hundreds, maybe thousands of them, and we have many more to lose, unfortunately. In the Canadian Rockies, we’ve lost about a quarter of the glacier volume since the turn of the century and this is one of the highest rates of loss in the world.

Most of the glaciers are more remote. And because we’ve got these U-shaped valley bottoms, we tend to put our infrastructure pretty far away from those glaciers.

But even if our infrastructure is further away, would that mean that we shouldn’t worry about it?

Well there’s a massive casualty event that almost happened in the Canadian Rockies. It was in 2012 in the summer, and a piece of the [Ghost Glacier] capped off along with a rock fall and fell into the pond beneath it. It caused a tsunami type wave that washed out the trails, the picnic areas, the parking lot and the road around Mount Edith Cavell [in Jasper National Park]. This is a very, very busy area. It happened in the middle of the night and no one was hurt.

If that had happened at three o’clock in the afternoon we could have had casualties of hundreds of people in that area. 

So we do have places at risk. We have many tourism spots where you can go in and hike in and look up and see a glacier overhead. Those glaciers are falling apart, they’re disintegrating. We do have regions like Lake Louise [in Banff National Park], others in Jasper National Park and the Columbia Icefield area that are essentially risky. The risk varies and it changes rapidly over time.

I’d never thought about Lake Louise as a place of risk, but do you mean Mount Victoria and the glacier?

Yeah, Mount Victoria at the back, simply because the number of climbers and others go in that area. In our situation it’s more alpinists that are exposed to that sort of terrain. 

Then, you know, things that have happened at the Bugaboos mountain range and others. These things are happening. And then the debris flows associated with thawing ground and heavy rains, this is also loss of the cryosphere. These things wash out the Trans-Canada Highway and some of the connecting roads almost every year somewhere and at least cause a temporary closure.

Let’s define ‘cryosphere’ — which means the frozen parts of the Earth. Can you speak more about the big picture, beyond just glaciers?

So glaciers are, of course, fed by snow.

If we don’t get the snowfall we get a melting glacier. The deeper the snow, the slower the glacier melts; the shallower the snow, the faster it melts. So that glacier snowpack tie-in is really strong. But it’s also important for permafrost because frozen ground doesn’t begin to thaw until the snow melt has occurred.

In a year with a late snowpack in the mountains, all the ground stays frozen pretty late in the year. In a year like we had in 2023, where it melts a month early or a month and a half early, then the ground thaw starts immediately after the snow disappears. 

Ultimately it’s driven by rising temperatures. And those rising temperatures — we’ve shown that 1.5 C is too much warming to hold the cryosphere together in the Rockies.

Even if climate warming stopped tomorrow and temperatures didn’t increase anymore, we’d lose almost all of them by the time we got into the early part of the 22nd century. 

So this is already too warm for the frozen part of the planet, and we’re warming up more all the time and this is human driven.

Glacial meltwater ends up in the oceans and contributes to rising ocean levels which floods coastal cities and ports. The thawing sea ice in the Arctic Ocean results in greater coastal erosion, reduced populations of seals and polar bears and other issues for that ecosystem.

The declining lake ice in our big lakes in Canada contributes to algae blooms in the summer and greater coastal erosion. The loss of winter snowpack means the winter roads that supply remote Indigenous communities have to shut early and are not as effective.

The other thing that’s shown up in just the last few years is that streams draining the Arctic tundra have acidified rapidly since 2023. 

And these were pristine streams that have now turned orange and become acidic and are full of heavy metals and sulfuric acid. And this is leaching of minerals from thawing permafrost into the streams, making them toxic. So we’re getting these rapid, rapid changes everywhere. And it manifests differently in every environment across Canada.

Why do you think it is that the connection [with ice melt] is not necessarily made?

For glaciers it’s partly because Canada doesn’t view itself as a mountain country. Not in the way that Switzerland or Norway would, or Nepal. And that’s odd because we have more glaciers than any other country on the planet, and we have some of the most spectacular mountain landscapes. These are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, but we don’t see that at the heart of our country. It’s at the western or northern edge of our country.

Also, we tended to avoid the glaciated areas, the really colder areas, because of the harsh winters associated with them.

But we’re all going to be feeling the effects whether we see it or not

Yeah, we are. It’s already impoverishing us economically. It’s causing ecosystem changes, collapses in some areas, and it’s going to get far, far worse. It’s accelerating rapidly.

When you say it’s impoverishing us economically, are you referring to infrastructure?

Wildfires have a strong association with the winter snowpack and the timing of spring snow melt. And we’ve had low snowpacks and early melts in exactly the worst wildfire years in the last few years. So the trigger for those early season wildfires is the low early snowpack.

The lowest snowpack and earlier snowmelt on record in the Fort McMurray area was 2016, just before the massive fires that destroyed that city, as an example. The other is thawing permafrost.

There’s lots of talk now about expanding the use of Churchill as a port on Hudson Bay due to the shorter ice covered season there. But the problem remains the train line, which has flooded out from snowmelt events and collapsed due to the thawing permafrost, and that’s getting worse.

Then there’s the hydroelectricity and the algae blooms. And then drought. Snowpack primarily, and glaciers to a secondary degree, provide water supply for vast downstream areas. So the Saskatchewan River Basin across the prairie provinces, which supports irrigation districts in cities like Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Prince Albert, Medicine Hat and the Okanagan from snowmelt gas struggled in recent years with snow droughts, resulting in low water levels and restrictions in irrigation and even urban water consumption. It ties into hydroelectric droughts as well because if the stream flow’s not there hydroelectricity’s generation capacity is lower as well.

What do you think Canada can or should do about this? 

Well, the first thing is to have a strong greenhouse gas mitigation strategy. Achieving net zero at the earliest possible opportunity. By that I mean 2030, 2035. It shouldn’t be an option. It’s a necessity for survival.

And we need to do that in concert with other countries around the world. That’s gonna be incredibly difficult, but we have to push for that and make that case in our foreign policy. 

The second is a plan for adaptation. Understand that floods will be different, droughts will be different, more severe, these glacier and permafrost and snow hazards will be increasing in mountain and other cool regions and that means more monitoring. More observation stations, better satellite measurement of these things and better predictions of floods or droughts or extreme events that may ensue from them. 

And then also working with communities to ensure that those early warning systems are appropriate for those communities and that community knowledge is used to design these things. Often the most vulnerable communities are Indigenous. And so those systems need to be designed with Indigenous people, bringing in their understanding and their knowledge systems into this to make effective prediction systems.

It requires big changes, but if we don’t start now, we’re not going to get there.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.