An assessment of recent and past cryospheric change in western Canada

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Direct observations provide one way to quantify the sensitivity of the cryosphere to climate change. These observations also represent an invaluable dataset to validate spaceborne measurements and refine models that simulate ice loss under projected climate change. My trainees and I will continue to assess the relation between recent and projected changes in climate and glacier mass loss. Our primary objective for the next five years will be to quantify contemporary (last 10 years), historical (last 100) and paleo (last 1000 years) area and mass loss of alpine glaciers in western Canada. We will focus our efforts where NSERC support can complement existing research in the Southern Coast, Southern Interior and Rocky mountains, but we will also initiate new assessments of mass and area change for mountains in the Western Canadian Arctic (eastern Yukon and Northwest Territories). Our methods to assess recent mass change will include airborne laser altimetry. In particular we will align our airborne laser surveys to help assess the reliability of NASA's new IceSat2 campaign to quantify mass loss for alpine glaciers. In collaboration with the Government of BC, we will assemble many tens of thousands of historical aerial photography to quantify area and mass loss for the last 70 years in the Southern Coast Mountains, an area that contains about one half the total ice cover in western North America excluding glaciers that straddle the BC/Alaska and Yukon/Alaska border. Our work to quantify area and mass loss over the last 1000 years will target glaciers in low and high latitudes in western Canada using terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide dating (TCN). The amplitude of 20th and early 21st century warming in the western Canadian Arctic exceeds most places on Earth, yet little is known about how these high latitude glaciers in the western Canadian Arctic respond to present and past climate change. Continued investment by Canada in science and technology is essential to solve problems that arise from present and future climate change. Climate change, environmental degradation, water resources, and hydroelectric power generation are issues in the public spotlight and are likely to be the focus of extensive research throughout this century. Over the duration of this grant, 5 PhD students, 3 MSc students, and numerous undergraduate students will be trained as experts in earth system science and geomatics, and cryospheric sciences. These highly skilled trainees will contribute to a strong and productive science and technology sector that will benefit Canadians and the Canadian economy.