Melting glaciers, crumbling mountains, and Alaska's climate crisis

20:24A solution like that could cost a billion dollars and take a decade to finish. Local miners have stepped up to say that they have the drilling know-how to do it faster, and for a lot less. So the core is listening. It's collected ideas from private industry and plans to pick a contractor by the end of the year. I'm going to look at what's proposed, and we're going to be incredibly aggressive, but I don't foresee a decade. The question is, at what price? Goetz says the project would be among the most impressive feats of engineering the Corps has ever done. But Alaska has some of the fastest melting glaciers on the planet.

21:00When the ice is gone, the floods will stop on their own. We know the glacier is changing. You just look at photos and see how it's receded. And we do think at some point in the future that this is not going to be a problem. But in the interim, we're talking decades until if we let nature run its course that this problem would resolve itself. And you need something sooner. I believe that citizens of Juneau need something sooner. By the next afternoon, the flood is raging. I'm on a bridge with a view of the Mendenhall Glacier in the distance, the turbulent river below. There's a bunch of trees going by.

21:36You see them? Scientist Aaron Hood and a team from the University of Alaska Southeast are tossing buckets off the bridge and hauling them back up with a rope. It's like fishing for dirty water, pretty much. The flood is at its peak, and the team needs water samples to measure the glacial sediment flowing downstream. 19.7, how does that compare? Specific conductivity? Yeah. Smack dab in exactly where we've been. 19.8? Yeah. Hood says this year's glacial flood in Juneau was the city's fourth largest on record. But two weeks later, a much bigger disaster would shock the world. A melting glacier collapsed in the Himalaya, sending a biblical torrent of ice and water roaring through mountain villages in Nepal and Tibet.

22:21More than 6 ,000 people either dead or missing. A warming climate is destabilizing ice sheets around the globe. It's creating new hazards that people like Sam Hatch must learn to live with. This is how high we raised the house. Four feet? About four feet, yep. Hatch rolls open his garage door to show me the war he's waging against the floods. New construction. After the 2023 flood damaged his foundation, Hatch razed his house off the ground. Well, to pick up a house and raise it and rebuild, I basically bought another house. Did you have to go into debt to do that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Quite a bit.

23:01You felt it was worth it. There's not a lot of homes in Juneau, so you have to walk away. You're looking at renting for 10 years. Hatch is aware of the irony. The qualities that make Alaska so unique, the glaciers, the river, the mountains, are what's causing this picture-perfect place so much trouble. It's sometimes hard to reconcile that it can be so pretty, and then one day it just shows up and freaking ruins everything. But I think that's nature. And I think a lot of what people do is they try and fight nature, and I think it'd be better off if we flexed and adapted. This year, Hatch's adaptation wasn't necessary.

23:35The temporary flood walls held the river back. But you can mark your calendar. Come summer 2027, Hatch is elevated home and the city itself will be put to the test again.

23:51Chris Bentley:Peter O'Dowd. Maybe the key to understanding this story and especially its connection to climate change is the Mendenhall Glacier itself. And while you can see the glacier from parts of town, including Juneau's airport, there is nothing like getting up close and on top of this force of nature. From a helicopter high above Juneau, the ice unspools from the mountain like a frozen ribbon. In the last frontier of Alaska, glaciers like this one are vanishing.

24:26Wow. Once the helicopter drops us off, the silence is jarring. A warm breeze slips down off the mountain, and scattered pools of melting ice create a shade of electric blue I never knew existed. Aaron Hood's been flying to this spot for 15 years, ever since it became the epicenter of an annual glacial lake outburst flood. He's an environmental scientist at the University of Alaska Southeast. To me, it's just stunning how different it is every time we come up here. Glacial floods are increasingly dangerous around the world. Just a few weeks ago, warming temperatures weakened an ice sheet in the Himalaya, triggering catastrophic floods and landslides in Nepal and Tibet.

25:09Something similar is happening in Alaska. Each summer, outside of Juneau, a natural reservoir that's formed along this glacier's edge fills with melting ice. The glacial lake has an unfortunate name, Suicide Basin. Three of its sides are towering cliffs, and the fourth is the glacier itself, which creates a giant ice dam that holds the water back. As summer wears on, the pressure builds to a breaking point. The water slips beneath the ice, and the dam is breached. I hear a crash in the distance. Oh, what's that? I have just more ice falling down over there. There's just a tremendous amount of shifting and settling going on in the ice right now because all of this just emptied yesterday.

25:53The day before we landed, 16 billion gallons of water rushed toward Juneau from this spot. There wasn't much damage, thanks in part to a new system of flood walls a few miles downstream. But in 2023, the outburst tore into the banks of the Mendenhall River. It ripped homes into the raging water. and the next year hundreds of houses were swamped. Start operation. Home point recorded. Entered obstacle avoidance mode. So every year Hood races here with his drone to photograph the basin as soon as it empties. The camera captures images that form a 3D map. It helps predict how big the next flood will be.

26:35This is the most important measurement we have of the year because when the basin's empty, we're able to map the full extent of it. It takes the drone nearly three hours to finish the job, and when it's done, we have time to explore to get even closer to the basin's edge. With spikes strapped to our shoes, we navigate the shifting terrain, past cracks in the ice where the water drips, drips, drips, until it becomes a gushing stream that carves deep channels into the ice known as mulans. One wrong step, well, people die up here. Last year, a man slipped into one of the mulans, his body still entombed in the glacier.

27:24A few minutes later, we've scrambled over boulders and we're standing at the edge of the basin. It is a colossal chasm nearly a mile long and 500 feet deep. We're close enough now to peer into the maw. It's something that most people in the world will never see or understand. And when I bring people here, they look out and say, oh my God, now I see what you're talking about. Because when you try to explain the scale to them, there's really no way to do it justice. Standing here, it's hard to imagine that just hours before, the basin was a glacial lake full of water. I asked Hood what it was like when the dam failed and billions of gallons started slipping beneath the ice.

28:12It starts very slowly, the drainage, because when the water starts to force its way under the glacier, the channels that it's moving through are very small. And as water moves through, the friction heats it up, and so it melts the channels larger. So it starts as a trickle and ends as a torrent when that subglacial channel is probably the size of a subway tunnel, dumping water down to the toe of the glacier. So in that sense, this is the source of all the trouble in Juneau. This right here is the source of all the trouble in Juneau. How quickly is the ice receding here on this glacier? Well, at the toe of the glacier, it's retreating back 10 to 50 meters a year or more.

28:56but a lot of the volume that's being lost from the glacier is because the whole lower part of the glacier is thinning and so we see thinning rates around here of around four meters per year so if you walk to the edge of the glacier go to the rock face spray paint your name on there you come back two years later it'll probably be 25 feet above your head so right in this spot in the last decade, we've probably lost about 120 feet of ice. Amazing. Alaska seems like ground zero for some of the warming that's happening on the planet. How is climate change driving what's happening here? Yeah, Alaska is actually, of anywhere on Earth, the mountain glaciers in this region are melting more rapidly than any other mountain glaciers.

29:45The reason for that is that we have a tremendous amount of ice at relatively low elevation where it's pretty warm. And so we're seeing thinning and retreat rates that are extraordinarily high. And there's also a tremendous amount of ice. And so this is creating situations like the one we have here. But if we zoom out, we can also see that the glaciers in Alaska that are melting are contributing substantially to sea level rise. What strikes me is that climate change is contributing to these terrible glacial outburst floods in Juneau, but eventually, because the ice is going away so quickly, it's going to solve the problem as well, isn't it?

30:25Yes. The ice dam itself is melting away at, again, four or five meters per year. And the lower the ice dam gets, the less water that can be impounded in this basin. And at a certain point, the glacier will retreat up past the entrance to the basin and the flood will end. In the meantime, people downstream of this glacier are miserable because every time around this year, they're wondering whether or not they're going to lose their homes. What is the solution to this problem, in your opinion? How do you stop this force of nature from wreaking havoc downstream? Yeah, that's a loaded question. There's a lot of people who have ideas about the solution to this problem.

31:07One of the ideas that they're pursuing is drilling a tunnel through the mountain so that during the summer, as water was flowing into the basin, it would flow down the tunnel and then discharge into Mendenhall Lake, essentially bypassing the basin and not allowing it to fill. Like a drain. Exactly. They would put a drain tunnel into the bottom of the basin. The logistics of that, as you can see from standing here, are extremely complex in terms of tunneling under, coming out in an environment where you're coming out onto a rock face that's covered with giant icebergs. You probably have to tunnel through a mile and a half of rock in the mountain to even get access to the basin.

31:53I spent the last week in Juneau talking to people about this flood, learning about the community. Your name comes up all the time. You're clearly dedicated to this issue. Why do you spend so much of your time and your life trying to figure this out? Well, because I live in Juneau and I know people who live next to the river and you see what an impact it is. I mean, before we had the flood walls, people were at the mercy of the floods and people lost everything. They lost their cars. They lost their belongings. being able to help protect people from that, help them to understand what's at risk here and sort of the dynamics of this is really important.

32:36We also hope that because these lakes occur throughout Alaska, that we can take the program we're developing here to other places that are going to be impacted by hazards like this in the future. So considering all that, when you're standing here at the base of this empty basin, And like, how do you feel? What goes through your mind? I'm still overwhelmed by it because people come up with ideas all the time. Hey, we could put a siphon. We can bomb the glacier and destroy the ice dam. And then when you come up here and you see the scale and you understand it, you really understand what a complex engineering problem it will be to mitigate this natural hazard.

33:19Aaron Hood, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.

33:50Chris Bentley:threat in the ocean is challenging a traditional way of life. Stick around.

34:00Chris Bentley:In southeast Alaska, seafood is a way of life. Indigenous people have harvested shellfish for thousands of years, all the while contending with an invisible threat, poisonous blooms of algae. Now, climate change may be making it harder for Alaskans to stay safe, just as the state is boosting the business of farming the seas. So, as a frequent consumer of shellfish myself, I set out to meet some people working on the problem.

34:33Chris Bentley:Mehta Mesdag just needs a few ounces of oyster meat. The owner of Salty Lady Seafood Company is wading into the murky surf. It's a turbulent Alaska day with the wind whipping up a mist of rain and seawater, so we decide against kayaking out to the deeper part of her farm. I take it back. I'm going to tie over there first. It's more shallow. I don't want to fill my booth. She inspects a row of cages exposed by the low tide, encrusted with barnacles and full of growing oysters. These are too little. We can't chuck those. As a commercial oyster farmer, Mesdag has to send a sample of her product to state regulators every week during the selling season so they can test for toxins that cause paralytic shellfish poisoning.

35:22Chris Bentley:If the test comes back positive, Salty Lady will have to shut down for at least two weeks, a big deal for a business that makes most of its money in the summer. We had three years where we were getting closed and shut down and there was toxicity and we haven't seen any this season. What was that 2023 year like for you when there was a really bad algal bloom and you had to shut down a lot? Oh, we had multiple closures. It ended up being almost 10 weeks of closures during a 20-week season. And I feel horrible. We had a girl who flew out from the East Coast to do all of our processing. And without any oysters to harvest, there was no job for her.

36:02And we ended up having to lay off the majority of our crew and try to just make do.

36:07Chris Bentley:Salty lady survived. but the experience underscored a harsh reality of farming shellfish. It's almost impossible to predict or prevent poisonous algal blooms. The best you can do is test often and get the word out fast when a bloom is starting.

36:25Chris Bentley:That is why Raymond Paddock and James Referzo are digging holes at Juneau's Point Louisa Beach on a sunnier morning in August. They're with the Tlingit and Haida tribes, And they're part of a consortium of indigenous scientists across the region that issues public alerts about shellfish poisoning. Rafferzo says when he was a kid, his grandma showed him how to eat gumboots and cockles right out of the sand. Our people have been living off of it for thousands and thousands of years. Around his rubber boots, the sun shines on a marine cornucopia. Colorful starfish, goopy anemone, lush mats of kelp and algae.

37:04Chris Bentley:And if you dig down just a few inches Jimmy, can you grab that plastic bag? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah Butter clams, surf clams, blue mussels There is a reason the Tlingit people have a saying When the tide is out, the table is set A bald eagle swoops right over our heads Hoping to join in on the feast Majestic Those eagles Yeah They are amazing Hunting for shellfish as well He was probably looking to see if Jimmy left anything on the beach Nice as this scene is, harvesting shellfish can be dangerous. Microscopic phytoplankton are always in the water. Under the right conditions, they can reproduce exponentially and spit out toxins, contaminating filter feeders like oysters, clams, and mussels.

37:49Chris Bentley:Stories of poisoned shellfish go back hundreds of years, but fatalities are rare today. From 1993 to 2021, the state recorded 132 cases, resulting in five deaths. Native Alaskans have learned to manage the threat. But Raymond Paddock says that's getting harder to do. Since time immemorial, the people who lived here, or Tlingit and Haida people, would harvest in the area, and we would kind of stay away from the later summer months. It was something my grandparents, their parents, and so on and so on, would teach us as we were younger. And of course, now with climate change, we've seen that that's changed and it's unpredictable.

38:28Chris Bentley:He hopes by putting out public alerts, They can do for subsistence harvesters what the state's testing program does for commercial operations. They can't be everywhere, of course. Alaska has thousands of miles of coastline. But Paddock says without these advisories, harvesting shellfish is risky business. You're playing a game of rushing roulette, essentially. It's a big gamble to when we don't know if there is a spike in a harmful algal bloom. Yeah, it's a crapshoot. The threat is lurking even in Alaska's pristine wilderness. I'm up here in Spokane Cove, Glacier Bay National Park. Oyster catchers are flying along the beach.

39:11Chris Bentley:Bright orange bills looking for shellfish. Which, so are we. I'm here with some scientists from the University of Alaska Southeast who are digging for clams to try to test for the presence of toxins created by harmful algal blooms. but you could not be in a more spectacular place than this.

39:41Got one.

39:42Chris Bentley:That's one? That's a butter clam? That's a butter clam. We got one, Sidney! John Harley and Sidney Jones want butter clams, in particular, because they hold on to toxins longer than some other shellfish, making them a good indicator. And lately, they've been telling an interesting story. When we came out last year in 2025, some sites, including the site that we're digging at today, had some of the highest concentrations that we've ever seen in southeast Alaska. That means a potentially deadly bloom happened at some point in the previous few months. Out here in Glacier Bay, it might have gone unnoticed, but that data point is valuable.

40:21Chris Bentley:Even with all the testing and alerts, scientists still have a lot to learn. Harley says it's not as simple as warm water instant bloom. Some might. Salinity and turbidity might also play a role in the increasingly unpredictable seasons for shellfish poisoning. People are concerned about an expansion of the possible bloom window, which has historically probably been, you know, somewhat well-defined. And people have various ways of knowing when to harvest shellfish, both from traditional knowledge and also mnemonics like only eating shellfish in months that have an R. That mnemonic certainly doesn't work anymore.

40:58And it's possible that we might in the future see blooms in December and maybe even January and February.

41:04Chris Bentley:Humans are not the only ones getting sick. Harley has found toxins in fish, sea otters, and even wolf scat. It seems that wolves have been fairly successful at foraging on sea otters. And so there's this interesting sort of possibility of these paralytic shellfish toxins going from a strictly marine environment where they're produced into the terrestrial environment through a terrestrial predator that happens to feed on marine species. Wolves eat sea otters, which is something I never thought I'd hear until I came to Alaska. Yeah, everything is connected out here. And climate change is making new connections, too.

41:45Chris Bentley:In recent years, toxic blooms have poisoned fish in the Bering Sea, just shy of the Arctic Circle. Another sign that this problem, once confined to the warmest waters in times of year, may be expanding. Back in Juneau, there's anxiety over what that might mean for the region's growing business of farming the ocean.

42:10Chris Bentley:In their seaside lab, scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks dote on bubbling tanks of kelp, oysters, and baby abalone. It's a very relaxing noise. It really is. It's a very relaxing place to pour in here, yeah. James Crimp is a mariculture specialist with Alaska Sea Grant. He says Alaska has a good system to catch blooms before they make people sick. But if the state has to keep shutting down small businesses for weeks at a time, it could be death by a thousand cuts for an industry that's still trying to establish itself. Consuming commercially harvested shellfish from the state of Alaska is very safe.

42:46What we want to focus on is just making little tweaks in the testing process to make sure we get to the same end result, but cheaper and more effectively for growers.

42:55Chris Bentley:Growers like Salty Lady Seafood. Markets want to know that they're getting product consistently and farmers want to know that they can sell consistently. Maida Mesdag is back from her oyster farm and in her garage, shucking up a storm. She's preparing to ship some of the meat to state regulators. The company does its own testing, too, analyzing everything it can about the water around the farm to hopefully stay one step ahead of the next algal bloom. But anyone who works on the water knows you can only control so much. Harmful algae is just nature's way of reminding us that we are not always in charge.

43:40You know, I have heard the wild blueberry crop right now is really, really strong. And the bears, I guess, love these things. And so keep your eye out because I do think the bears are out eating the blueberries.

43:52Chris Bentley:You can tell from the color of the bear scat What they've been eating If it's been a lot of blueberries It's going to be a little blue Hey what's this one? Is that edible? I wouldn't eat it Why? Because I don't know But I do know enough that The one thing you can't eat Is a baneberry And that is red And so is this So it might be perfectly edible Hands off But I'd keep hands off Maybe I'll get into foraging now So, comes to Alaska once. Let me ask you, what is the one thing that has surprised you the most since you've been to Alaska? Because I think it's your first time, right? It is my first time in Alaska.

44:32Chris Bentley:Yeah, I've only been here a couple days. I am shocked by the beauty of it, which I knew it would be beautiful. But, you know, I've never seen a glacier before in my life. And I'm shocked, actually, at how close people are living to the glacier. Like, the Mendenhall Valley is like a populated suburb. that goes right up to the foot of this glacier. Well, it goes up to the foot of a lake that used to be a glacier not all that long ago. You look at a glacier, and it's a massive block of ice that seems immovable and eternal, but actually it's constantly moving and causing a lot of problems for people that are in the area who think it's kind of permanent.

45:10Yeah, and okay, so here's one of my takeaways, not that you asked, but... I was thinking it. Yes, so remember a while back, we traveled to Mississippi to cover the flooding of the mighty Mississippi, this just absolutely indomitable body of water in the United States. I'm having similar vibes in Alaska. Here it's the same sort of thing. People are grappling with this idea of how in the world do you beat Mother Nature? Like, you don't, I think, is one of the answers to that question. And yet people are putting so much time and so much energy into trying to win this fight against a changing climate.

45:47And I think that's fascinating because you can't blame somebody, whether you're in Mississippi or in Alaska, you can't blame people for wanting to protect where they live, their homes, their livelihoods, where their children grew up, where they have memories growing up themselves. And I think that is a really human thing that I've noticed as we've traveled around the country reporting on climate issues, the willingness and the interest that people have in trying to beat Mother Nature. And it is a fight that I personally don't ever want to have. And I really feel for the folks who are in that fight right now.

46:19Chris Bentley:Yeah. I mean, beat Mother Nature, I guess, is one way to think about it. Like, people often talk about climate adaptation, and it sounds so, like, you know, jargony. Yeah. But, like, that's what adapting is, is, like, you're trying to preserve a condition of life in the face of changing natural conditions around you. And it strikes me that like Southeast Alaska is one of those places where people have been adapting to the environment and to some extent to climate change for a very long time, for as long as people have been around. Native Alaskans have been dealing with glaciers retreating and advancing actually for thousands of years.

46:52Chris Bentley:They've been dealing with algal blooms, landslides, the land physically changing under their feet and the water changing around them, the animals changing around them for thousands of years. So they're actually very good at it. Now climate change presents this difficult question where it's like, we know people can adapt. Can they adapt at the pace that the climate is changing? And at what cost? I was having a conversation with a top official at the Army Corps of Engineers here in Juneau trying to solve the problem of the glacial outburst floods. And, you know, they are talking about drilling into a mountain.

47:25He's like, it would rival what we have done in Louisiana, in New Orleans. And just, like, think about that. Think about the feat of engineering and the amount of money it must take in time and expertise to try to make those adaptations, which is the word that people use, which I would also again say it's not so much adaptation is just trying to win.

47:53Chris Bentley:We're going to have to continue that conversation another time. And you know we will with more reporting from our series Reverse Course. So click that follow button in your podcast player. But that's it for the show today and this installment of Reverse Course. Here and now anytime comes from NPR and WBR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Peter O'Dowd and me, Chris Bentley, and edited by Chico Theory. Michael Scotto edited the podcast. Peter and I had a lot of help along the way putting these stories together, and we want to thank the local newsrooms in southeast Alaska that have been doggedly covering landslides and glacial floods long before we did.

48:31Chris Bentley:Special thanks to KHNS reporter Avery Elfelt in Haines, KTOO's Alex Solomon in Juneau, and Rasha McChesney of the Chilcat Valley News. Our stories were mixed by Caleb Green, Andre Peralta, and Matt Reed. The theme music for Here and Now Anytime is by Mike Mischetto, Max Liebman, and me, Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Allison Hagen and Grace Griffin, who made sure that there is lots more to read and see for all these stories at hereandnow.org and on social media. On TikTok, we are at hereandnowradio. And on Instagram and YouTube, we are at hereandnowradio. Follow us for video from Alaska.

49:10Chris Bentley:And check out the website for photos and more detail about everything here today. That's hereandnow.org. And the executive producer of Here and Now is Alan Price. Hope to see you online. and, of course, in future episodes. I mean, if you made it this far and have not clicked that follow button yet, why not? Here and Now Anytime has new episodes every single weekday of the year. We'll have more climate reporting and interesting voices from all corners of the country very soon. Till next time, thanks for listening.

49:45Support for Here and Now's Reverse Course comes from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. committed to science and innovation to sustain the ocean that sustains life on Earth. Details at whoi.edu.