Glaciers around the world are endangered — but no two are alike

Part of my work as a geographer and glacier scientist involves traveling around the world. Literally. Several times a year, I join expeditions, traversing continents and oceans, sometimes half the planet, in mere days. I’ve visited glaciers in some startling places — like Uganda’s Stanley Glacier, where ice retreat influences human health and malaria outbreaks. Or Iceland’s Breiðamerkurjökull, where glacier change is exacerbating the ice-breaking pressures of global tourism. Or South Georgia’s Heaney Glacier, where ice retreat has provided expansive real estate for one of the largest King penguin colonies on Earth. My job is to translate the landscape: how oceans move nutrients pole-to-pole; why one mountain might support snow but another does not; how glaciers shape societies. I’ll own it’s a peculiar way to experience the world. From 30,000 feet, borders fall away. Trees become forests become systems become a living planet. I see connections everywhere. But that view from 30,000 feet, while striking, can miss much of what’s unfolding below at the individual level — the people, the lives, the histories. Glaciers, I think, suffer from this same problem of perspective. We tend to see them from a great distance, as a single, global story. They’re tallied together: some 275,000 individual glaciers remain worldwide. They’re measured together: how quickly they are shrinking, how much they impact sea level change, how long before they are gone. How many of them already are. But glaciers have never lived identical lives. My work has shown over and over that every glacier has a distinct life history, shaped by and shaping the communities, landscapes, and systems around it. As glaciers change, we aren’t witnessing a single global glacier story from 30,000 feet. We are witnessing hundreds of thousands of individual stories of transformation. One of the most surprising is unfolding right in my own backyard. In the Pacific Northwest, a young glacier is growing An aerial view of Mount St. Helens in June 2024, with Mount Hood in the distance on the left. USGS My most recent expedition took me to nine countries. But I started the trip in Portland, Oregon — just north of my home in Eugene — land of the exhilaratingly perfect medium roast coffee and the Cascade volcano chain I used to orient myself for most of my childhood. The first morning, I ran up to the hotel’s top floor to see if the weather was clear enough to peer 50 miles northeast toward Mount St. Helens, across the border in Washington state. From downtown, it is easy to distinguish her whaleback summit, notably slumped in comparison to the sharper profiles of Mount Hood and Mount Adams. What isn’t visible from this distance is the secret Mount St. Helens is hiding within. The volcano erupted in May of 1980, two years before I was born. I grew up hearing stories of how ash coated our family farm, how the afternoon sky turned murky, how one terrified horse kicked through her box stall door. What I didn’t learn until much, much later was that, prior to the eruption, Mount St. Helens supported 11 named glaciers and two small unnamed ones. The nine-hour Plinian eruption destroyed 70 percent of the mountain’s ice, including the Loowit and Leschi glaciers, while the summit and entire north flank collapsed, leaving behind a horseshoe-shaped crater roughly two miles wide. If you’ve ever received a climbing permit from the U.S. Forest Service, hiked to the crater rim, and gazed into that windy bowl of pumice and dark basalts, I can almost guarantee the very last word on your mind is “nursery.” Trust me. I rocked my baby in a softly-lit Scandinavian-paletted room designed for every possible infant need. But Mount St. Helens, apparently a fan of free-range parenting, took another approach. And it worked. Inside that raw volcanic maw, a baby glacier is growing inside. The eruption that destroyed most of Mount St. Helens’ glaciers also created the perfect conditions to grow a new one. Winter after winter, snow fell on the volcano’s steep headwall, and then it avalanched, repeatedly, into the crater floor below. By September 1996, scientists observed that the 16-year-old body of snow and ice had begun to move, flow. This fact is existential — glaciers are defined as moving bodies of land ice that persist year after year. When glaciers stop moving, they are “dead” — it’s not just loss of volume that threatens their identity as glaciers. The Okjökull glacier in Iceland was declared dead in 2014 when it stopped flowing; in 2019, the nation held a funeral for it. But here, the opposite has happened. Welcome to the world, Crater Glacier. A view of Crater Glacier in 2005. M Jackson There is something equally wonderful and strange about being almost exactly the same age as a glacier. We’re both children of the 80s, who grew up under the same Cascade volcanoes. I became a glaciologist; she became a glacier. And we’ve both had setbacks. Me: paying my bills, becoming a mother, and learning, repeatedly, that adulthood rarely follows the topography you planned. Crater Glacier: Mount St. Helens, in 2004, erupted again. Magma began pushing up beneath her. A lava dome swelled through the crater floor and into the glacier itself — the first time scientists observed the emplacement of a lava dome through glacier ice. It split her in two. As the dome grew, the now separate arms of the glacier deformed, then thickened and sped up, flowing 1 to 2 feet (30 to 60 centimeters) per day. Within four years, those arms stretched all the way around the lava dome and rejoined. And the glacier kept going. Between 2009 and 2019, she gained some 13.8 million cubic meters of ice and advanced more than a thousand feet. My colleagues have noted that her advance is slowing. Eventually, warming Pacific Northwest summers may overwhelm the unique climate zone inside Mount St. Helens’ crater. Or, the volcano might erupt again. And that matters to the people living below. Crater Glacier’s body wraps around an active vent and lava dome. A future eruption could melt ice, mix with ash, pumice, and rock and become a lahar, a fast-moving slurry of water, mud, trees, and whatever else it picks up as it races downslope. Lahars from the 1980 eruption destroyed homes, bridges, and roads. Growing up, I remember how we were taught drills for lahars alongside earthquakes and fires. It isn’t lost on me how radically the landscape I grew up with has changed, or how much more it will change in the years to come. But, as I follow Crater Glacier’s development, I’m reminded that it isn’t all bad. This one glacier, among hundreds of thousands, is writing a story I could never have imagined. n Azerbaijan, forgotten glaciers become much-needed water I arrive in Baku, Azerbaijan, in July. It is sweltering. This country has glaciers, but I won’t see them on this trip. The last time I saw ice in the Caucasus, I was on a Fulbright in Turkey, living on the Black Sea and exploring these mountains from the west. The ice I saw then would be unrecognizable today. Between 2000 and 2020, Azerbaijan lost 77 percent of the country’s total glacier area. To me, that’s baffling to think about. 77 percent. Over 20 years. Half my life. And yet, almost no one I meet in Azerbaijan seems particularly interested in talking about glaciers. I risk distracting my driver, Kamran, a delightful 20-something local man who weaves through Baku’s insane, seven-lanes-of-madness traffic like it’s nothing. The Caspian Sea twinkles peacefully to our left, oil derricks lazily chugging. To our right, the city’s iconic blue-gleaming high-rises overlap with mosques and war memorials. A mud volcano at Gobustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve in Azerbaijan. M Jackson “We don’t bother with them,” Kamran tells me, speaking of the glaciers. He pivots quickly to Gobustan, a district south of Baku that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Had I seen the mud volcanoes? “Tourists come all the time now to see the methane volcanoes.” I keep encountering this indifference. My colleague, Suleyman, also doesn’t want to talk about glaciers and spends the bulk of our coffee telling me about the pending F1 race in Baku. He doesn’t even bother glancing at the map I’ve brought. Azerbaijan’s glaciers are remote, tiny, and high in the Eastern Caucasus. By 2025, 14 fragmented glaciers remain, covering together about 124 acres — roughly one-tenth of the ice that covered these mountains in the 1890s. But glaciers here, like glaciers everywhere, are critical components of regional water cycles. Glaciers hold water — for years, decades, centuries. They are reservoirs that do not need to be constructed. And in Azerbaijan, water and water storage matter. Agriculture relies on a complex system of reservoirs, canals, and irrigation. Groundwater withdrawals have increased some fourfold since 2000, largely fueled by farms growing wheat, fruit, and vegetables. In 2025, researchers climbed Azerbaijan’s Tufandag Glacier and reported retreat, accelerated melting, and expanding crevasses. Below it, the Mahmuddara River had increased water levels and discharge rates. This is how a glacier can disappear in plain sight: by transforming into liquid. As a glacier melts, it releases more water downstream. And for that reason, the current precipitous decline of Azerbaijan’s glaciers is almost a boon. Glacier becomes meltwater, river, irrigation, drinking water, wheat, lettuce, peaches. Farmers rejoice. But, eventually, too much ice dissolves and the runoff peaks, then decreases. In glaciology, we call this “peak water,” when a disappearing glacier gives us the most water it ever will. The cycle of savings and withdrawals that has defined this landscape for centuries will ultimately end like this, when the bank is forced to close. Has Tufandag Glacier, or any of Azerbaijan’s 13 other glaciers, crossed that threshold? I don’t know. The increased flow of the Mahmuddara is only one measurement, from one glacier, that cannot fully answer that question. But I can think back to the ice I saw in these same mountains years ago, then look at the Caucasus today, and I understand that it has transformed. Water that was ice, storage, cold is now warm liquid moving downstream. Azerbaijan’s remaining glaciers may not survive this century. People in the coming years are going to have to do what glaciers once did — come up with more ways to store more water. Catch it when it arrives and hold it until it’s needed. I keep thinking about the apparent indifference many Azerbaijanis show towards glaciers. Maybe Kamran’s response is more revealing than I initially thought. Perhaps the first step of a glacier disappearing from a landscape is it disappearing from conversation. In Japan, newly discovered glaciers are already fading A view out the window of a plane at Kuranosuke Glacier in Japan. M Jackson If you ever get a chance, wander through the Tateyama Museum in Toyama Prefecture, Japan. The exquisite open-air museum explores the nearby Mount Tateyama as both landscape and sacred place: a perennially snow-covered mountain, a dwelling place of spirits and the dead, a realm containing hell and heaven. There is a poem there by the eighth-century poet Ōtomo no Yakamochi about Tateyama’s summer snow and its association with the divine. It stops me. Some 1,300 years ago, people were already writing — marveling — about the snow that refused to disappear. Japan’s Sea-of-Japan side is one of the snowiest places on Earth, a skier’s powder paradise. And yet, for years, my colleagues and I thought no glaciers existed east of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The landscape was too warm, the mountains too low, to support glaciers under today’s conditions. For glaciers — moving bodies of land ice that persist year after year — the base variables are critical: snow, time, and temperature. But those variables do interact with intensely local conditions such as wind, topography, shade — even human activity. It matters where snow falls, where it blows, and where a landscape and people allow it to accumulate. Japan is technically not cold enough long enough to support glaciers. But it is extraordinarily snowy. When I flew over Tateyama in June, most of the three-peaked massif was grey — alpine bare, with significant snow melt. But I did see a few Dalmatian-like white pockets in shaded nooks and north-facing crannies. If I hadn’t known better, I would have just labeled them as snow patches. Remember: Definitionally, a glacier must flow under its own weight. More movement is a sign of a healthy glacier. Snow patches, regardless of how long they’ve existed or if they contain ice, do not move. Everyone in the bustling world of cryospheric research knew Japan had snow patches. More than 100 had been identified in the northern Japanese Alps alone. In the 1970s, researchers began observing holes in Kuranosuke — one such snow patch, roughly 6 acres in area — that looked and behaved like glacial features called moulins. In 1979, a Japanese researcher investigated one of the moulins by using the time-honored glaciological technique of climbing directly into it. He discovered layers of ancient ice, an observation supported later by radiocarbon analysis of embedded wood and leaf debris that were dated to approximately 1,700 years old. Old, yes. But old does not make a glacier. Movement does. And so Kuranosuke remained, scientifically speaking, for decades and decades, a snow patch. Sunrise at the Kuranosuke hiking hut in the Northern Japanese Alps in July 2025. Antoine Boureau / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images But then, starting in 2009, researchers Kotaro Fukui and Hajime Iida of the Tateyama Caldera Sabo Museum used state-of-the-art geodetic measurements and ground-penetrating radar to take a closer look at several well-known perennial snow patches in the Japanese Alps. They showed that the Gozenzawa, Sannomado, and Komado snowpatches were, in fact, flowing. They were glaciers. Take that in. I have spent my entire life watching ice disappear faster than we can understand it. Yet here are glaciers we never knew existed. It makes me immediately wonder — what other ones might be out there, if only we had time, resources, and the will to look? The researchers turned to Kuranosuke next. They found that the snowpatch was flowing roughly 3 centimeters a year — the equivalent width of one of the LEGO bricks my son always leaves on our stairs. An almost absurdly small measurement, but 3 centimeters is still flow. Movement. This transformed Kuranosuke from a snowpatch into a glacier. Still, identities are never quite so fixed. Recently, Kukui, Iida, and Tomoyoshi Kosaka have argued that Kuranosuke is in the midst of another slow transformation. As Japan warms, its glaciers and snow patches are losing crucial ice mass. They say that Kuranosuke is declining. It exists now in a nebulous no-scientist’s-land between glacier and snow patch, blurring the very boundaries of glacierhood. One could easily look at that as a poignant story of loss: This glacier is dying, and we’ve barely had a chance to really know her. But when I look at Kuranosuke, I see a story of persistence. For at least 1,700 years, some form of ice and snow has held here, through centuries of summers, through blurring with the divine, through recognition as perennial snowpatch and then glacier. And now, glacier-in-transformation. I don’t think the disappearance of Kuranosuke will diminish local people’s reverence for Tateyama. If anything, as the mountain’s once-perennial snow and ice disappear, Ōtomo no Yakamochi’s poem may take on even greater meaning. For 1,300 years, these words and this snow have persisted. We may be the last generation to witness them together. For all these glaciers, and countless others, their stories are neither simple nor predictable. These are not merely stories of inches lost. If anything, they prove that we are far from certain about what the future holds. Kuranosuke and her neighbors defied decades of settled science by asserting their existence as glaciers. Tufandag is bringing abundance to the river and farms below it — though for how much longer, we don’t know. And Crater Glacier is still growing, thriving as so many others dissolve. I find something profoundly moving in that. And me? I’m still circling the planet, collecting glacier stories. Maybe, like Ōtomo no Yakamochi’s poem, we’ll need them someday. To remember.