Alberta faces melting glaciers and drought

The CBC reports on the problems faced by Alberta due to glacial melt:

Alberta faces a dry winter and drought due to glacial melt. Phot by: https://www.flickr.com/photos/laszlo-photo/

Alberta faces a dry winter and drought due to glacial melt.
Phot by: https://www.flickr.com/photos/laszlo-photo/

“Receding glaciers and lack of rain are already having an impact on local waterways, but there’s more bad news to come.

“Up in the Athabasca Glacier, we measured three metres of ice melt already this year, up until July,” said hydrologist John Pomeroy.

“If you look at the glaciers down in K-Country and up through the Bow Valley, they tend to have very limited or no snow at all at the higher elevations, which means that there won’t be any recharge of the glaciers this year from the snow accumulating at the top, which is very bad news for them.”

(Break)

Those receding glaciers help feed Alberta’s rivers, and combined with a lack of rain in many parts of the province, it creates a troubling picture, with the Bow River at 40 per cent of normal in Calgary and some mountain streams bone dry.

“It’s record drought, still, over parts of the prairies, and some areas in the mountains are over 120 millimetres below normal this year,” says Pomeroy.”

To read more about the changing world and what you can do to prepare, visit: www.greatwavesofchange.org

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