A Day Afloat in Glacier Bay, Alaska

Glacier Bay National Park, in southeast Alaska, is unusual: Most of its visitors never set foot on it. Most of its visitors arrive by cruise ship, spend the day looking around and leave. And, at least for me, it was a highlight of a week’s Alaska cruise.

It’s where several glaciers reach down toward the water, from high in the mountains above. Each year’s snow adds to the top, helps compress the previous year’s pack even more, and contributes to the weight that slowly moves the glacier downhill.

To my surprise, they don’t all look like the wall of ice up at the top; there’s a lot of dirt lying on top of many of them, such as the Grand Pacific Glacier in the picture just above. The white face occurs most often on glaciers that actually reach down to the water; the clean face reflects the constant calving, or breaking off of chunks of ice.

The pieces that break off are icebergs. Obviously, in Glacier Bay, not the size that sank the Titanic, but big enough to be careful around, and big enough to provide space for seals, eagles and other wildlife in the area.

Many of the glaciers in Glacier Bay are not getting enough new packed snow each year to keep growing and calving, and they are receding from the bay, exposing land underneath. The picture below shows a new development this year: the Margerie Glacier, up to now the most stable and advancing one in the bay, now shows a small area of exposed land at its edge.

How that will develop, and how long it might take before Margerie joins others in retreat isn’t known; the Park Rangers just noticed it this year and are watching.

While it’s possible to get ashore in the park by small boat or float plane, and to hike in the area, it’s expensive and frankly, large numbers visiting that way would probably not be best for the fragile environment.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no park experience for those of us who visit by cruise ship!

Most of the cruise ships enter early in the morning; along with some other members of the Steve Spangler Science at Sea group we were traveling with, we went up early to watch. As we went deeper into the bay, a team of Park Service Rangers joined us from a launch, and came up a ladder onto the ship.

There were rangers on deck, and lectures and displays as well. We were fortunate in our group to have an Alaska naturalist as part of the program, and we got our own ranger as well. Through most of the day, we were on deck watching as he provided commentary, and as the ship made its circuit of the bay. Sometimes as many as 4 or 5 ships visit the bay each day, and move in a circuit to avoid congestion. Each gets about an hour at the Margerie glacier.

The cycle of glaciers forming and receding has been going on for a long time; what concerns scientists and the Park Service staff is that the rate appears to be accelerating, which raises questions of sea level, and whether existing species will be able to continue to live in the area.

Which is not to say that it’s always been a very slow process. Capt. George Vancouver, the British naval officer who mapped much of the U.S. northwest, British Columbia and Alaska, and named hundreds of rivers, mountains and bays, never saw Glacier Bay on his 1799 voyage; it was completely covered in ice. By the 1850s, it had opened up.

The Muir Glacier, which was the most popular stopping point for cruise ships in the 1950s, when the modern cruise industry started up, is now not a glacier but an inlet. The two small towns that are within the Park, Gustavus and Adolphus, were settled 100 years apart; Adolphus was under ice when Gustavus was settled.

Incidentally, despite what it looks like, the towns were not named for a King of Sweden. Vancouver named Gustavus for a son of the later King George IV. When Adolphus was settled, it was named by a Swedish explorer who made exactly the same wrong assumption the rest of us did about where Gustavus got its name. Or so the locals say.

Because it’s actively calving and moving to the water, Margerie gets most of the attention. It’s difficult to see in a photo just how big it is, but perhaps the 12-story cruise ship in front of it gives a hint. The face of the glacier is 250 feet high.