![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Glacier-79WEB.jpg\"\/)
Canada tends to have fewer communities located directly below glaciers than other mountain nations, but that doesn\u2019t mean melting glaciers aren\u2019t a risk here. Photo: Amber Bracken \/ The Narwhal<\/p>\nJohn Pomeroy had only been back in Canmore, Alta., for two weeks, returning from a research trip in Tibet, when he heard the news of a glacier collapse in Nepal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The director of the University of Saskatchewan\u2019s Centre for Hydrology has been working non-stop ever since, trying to make sense of what happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just horrific,\u201d Pomeroy said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When he saw the magnitude of the disaster, Pomeroy immediately made contact with his Nepalese colleagues to assist with analysis.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As of Sept. 1, when The Narwhal last spoke with Pomeroy, he said the team believes that years of warm temperatures, a particularly warm, wet summer and thawing permafrost led rock to fracture. The rock combined with glacier ice to form an avalanche of debris, on top of releasing a large volume of meltwater which had been stored in the glacier. The torrent of debris immediately formed a wave of destruction.<\/p>\n
More than 1,000 people are dead and thousands more are missing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was very, very fast,\u201d said Pomeroy, who is also a UNESCO chair in mountain water sustainability.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Early warning systems weren\u2019t capable of giving enough time, Pomery explained. It wasn\u2019t until later when officials could see water levels rising \u2014 a precursor to the tsunami that was coming, that a flood warning could be issued downstream.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt looks like a lot of the warnings came from the local communities,\u201d Pomeroy said. \u201cThey got messages out that the wave was coming to the next [communities] downstream before communications were wiped out.\u201d<\/p>\n
The team was monitoring three lakes that had formed since the impact, which were at risk of breaking and causing further flooding. Pomeroy said the lower lake caused high flows on Friday, leading to evacuation.<\/p>\n
While that flow has subsided, there\u2019s still danger from the two remaining lakes, Pomeroy explained.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not safe yet,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd this glacier is still very unstable and more could break apart.\u201d<\/p>\n
Canada tends to have fewer communities located directly below glaciers than other mountain nations, but that doesn\u2019t mean melting glaciers aren\u2019t a risk here. Photo: Amber Bracken \/ The Narwhal<\/p>\n
While Pomeroy has research collaborations in Tibet focused on the problems associated with a warming climate, much of his research is focused in Canada, which is home to more than 30,000 glaciers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Pomeroy and upwards of 20 students and technicians study mountain glaciers, snow and hydrology from the University of Saskatchewan\u2019s Coldwater Laboratory in Canmore, Alta.<\/p>\n
He wants people to know that what\u2019s happening with glaciers in Canada, and globally, is about so much more. It\u2019s about the cryosphere \u2014 everything that\u2019s frozen, from permafrost, to glaciers, to snow and ice caps.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Narwhal spoke with Pomeroy over the phone to learn more about what\u2019s happening with our glaciers and what, if anything, we can do about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This conversation was edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
Glaciers seem to fly under the radar here. There are events happening related to glaciers in Canada and they don\u2019t really get a lot of attention.<\/p>\n
I agree, we don\u2019t tend to have communities right under a glacier in most places, like they do in Switzerland or Nepal or the Andes. But we do have many, many glaciers. We have more glaciers than any other country.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve lost hundreds, maybe thousands of them, and we have many more to lose, unfortunately. In the Canadian Rockies, we\u2019ve lost about a quarter of the glacier volume since the turn of the century and this is one of the highest rates of loss in the world.<\/p>\n
Most of the glaciers are more remote. And because we\u2019ve got these U-shaped valley bottoms, we tend to put our infrastructure pretty far away from those glaciers.<\/p>\n
But even if our infrastructure is further away, would that mean that we shouldn\u2019t worry about it?<\/p>\n
Well there\u2019s a massive casualty event that almost happened<\/a> in the Canadian Rockies. It was in 2012 in the summer, and a piece of the [Ghost Glacier] capped off along with a rock fall and fell into the pond beneath it. It caused a tsunami type wave that washed out the trails, the picnic areas, the parking lot and the road around Mount Edith Cavell [in Jasper National Park]. This is a very, very busy area. It happened in the middle of the night and no one was hurt.<\/p>\n If that had happened at three o\u2019clock in the afternoon we could have had casualties of hundreds of people in that area.\u00a0<\/p>\n So we do have places at risk. We have many tourism spots where you can go in and hike in and look up and see a glacier overhead. Those glaciers are falling apart, they\u2019re disintegrating. We do have regions like Lake Louise [in Banff National Park], others in Jasper National Park and the Columbia Icefield area that are essentially risky. The risk varies and it changes rapidly over time.<\/p>\n I\u2019d never thought about Lake Louise as a place of risk, but do you mean Mount Victoria and the glacier<\/a>?<\/p>\n Yeah, Mount Victoria at the back, simply because the number of climbers and others go in that area. In our situation it\u2019s more alpinists that are exposed to that sort of terrain.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then, you know, things that have happened at the Bugaboos mountain range and others. These things are happening. And then the debris flows associated with thawing ground and heavy rains, this is also loss of the cryosphere. These things wash out the Trans-Canada Highway and some of the connecting roads almost every year somewhere and at least cause a temporary closure.<\/p>\n Dive deeper on this topic<\/p>\n Let\u2019s define \u2018cryosphere\u2019 \u2014 which means the frozen parts of the Earth. Can you speak more about the big picture, beyond just glaciers?<\/p>\n So glaciers are, of course, fed by snow.<\/p>\n If we don\u2019t get the snowfall we get a melting glacier. The deeper the snow, the slower the glacier melts; the shallower the snow, the faster it melts. So that glacier snowpack tie-in is really strong. But it\u2019s also important for permafrost because frozen ground doesn\u2019t begin to thaw until the snow melt has occurred.<\/p>\n In a year with a late snowpack in the mountains, all the ground stays frozen pretty late in the year. In a year like we had in 2023, where it melts a month early or a month and a half early, then the ground thaw starts immediately after the snow disappears.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ultimately it\u2019s driven by rising temperatures. And those rising temperatures \u2014 we\u2019ve shown that 1.5 C is too much warming to hold the cryosphere together in the Rockies.<\/p>\n Even if climate warming stopped tomorrow and temperatures didn\u2019t increase anymore, we\u2019d lose almost all of them by the time we got into the early part of the 22nd century.\u00a0<\/p>\n So this is already too warm for the frozen part of the planet, and we\u2019re warming up more all the time and this is human driven.<\/p>\n Glacial meltwater ends up in the oceans and contributes to rising ocean levels which floods coastal cities and ports. The thawing sea ice in the Arctic Ocean results in greater coastal erosion, reduced populations of seals and polar bears and other issues for that ecosystem.<\/p>\n The declining lake ice in our big lakes in Canada contributes to algae blooms in the summer and greater coastal erosion. The loss of winter snowpack means the winter roads that supply remote Indigenous communities have to shut early and are not as effective<\/a>.<\/p>\n The other thing that\u2019s shown up in just the last few years is that streams draining the Arctic tundra have acidified rapidly since 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n And these were pristine streams that have now turned orange and become acidic and are full of heavy metals and sulfuric acid. And this is leaching of minerals from thawing permafrost into the streams, making them toxic. So we\u2019re getting these rapid, rapid changes everywhere. And it manifests differently in every environment across Canada.<\/p>\n Dive deeper on this topic<\/p>\n Why do you think it is that the connection [with ice melt] is not necessarily made?<\/p>\n For glaciers it\u2019s partly because Canada doesn\u2019t view itself as a mountain country. Not in the way that Switzerland or Norway would, or Nepal. And that\u2019s odd because we have more glaciers than any other country on the planet, and we have some of the most spectacular mountain landscapes. These are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, but we don\u2019t see that at the heart of our country. It\u2019s at the western or northern edge of our country.<\/p>\n Also, we tended to avoid the glaciated areas, the really colder areas, because of the harsh winters associated with them.<\/p>\n But we\u2019re all going to be feeling the effects whether we see it or not<\/p>\n Yeah, we are. It\u2019s already impoverishing us economically. It\u2019s causing ecosystem changes, collapses in some areas, and it\u2019s going to get far, far worse. It\u2019s accelerating rapidly.<\/p>\n When you say it\u2019s impoverishing us economically, are you referring to infrastructure?<\/p>\n Wildfires have a strong association with the winter snowpack and the timing of spring snow melt. And we\u2019ve had low snowpacks and early melts in exactly the worst wildfire years in the last few years. So the trigger for those early season wildfires is the low early snowpack.<\/p>\n The lowest snowpack and earlier snowmelt on record in the Fort McMurray area was 2016, just before the massive fires that destroyed that city, as an example. The other is thawing permafrost.<\/p>\n There\u2019s lots of talk now about expanding the use of Churchill as a port on Hudson Bay due to the shorter ice covered season there. But the problem remains the train line, which has flooded out from snowmelt events and collapsed due to the thawing permafrost, and that\u2019s getting worse.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the hydroelectricity and the algae blooms. And then drought. Snowpack primarily, and glaciers to a secondary degree, provide water supply for vast downstream areas. So the Saskatchewan River Basin across the prairie provinces, which supports irrigation districts in cities like Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Prince Albert, Medicine Hat and the Okanagan from snowmelt gas struggled in recent years with snow droughts, resulting in low water levels and restrictions in irrigation and even urban water consumption. It ties into hydroelectric droughts<\/a> as well because if the stream flow\u2019s not there hydroelectricity\u2019s generation capacity is lower as well.<\/p>\n What do you think Canada can or should do about this?\u00a0<\/p>\n Well, the first thing is to have a strong greenhouse gas mitigation strategy. Achieving net zero at the earliest possible opportunity. By that I mean 2030, 2035. It shouldn\u2019t be an option. It\u2019s a necessity for survival.<\/p>\n And we need to do that in concert with other countries around the world. That\u2019s gonna be incredibly difficult, but we have to push for that and make that case in our foreign policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n The second is a plan for adaptation. Understand that floods will be different, droughts will be different, more severe, these glacier and permafrost and snow hazards will be increasing in mountain and other cool regions and that means more monitoring. More observation stations, better satellite measurement of these things and better predictions of floods or droughts or extreme events that may ensue from them.\u00a0<\/p>\n And then also working with communities to ensure that those early warning systems are appropriate for those communities and that community knowledge is used to design these things. Often the most vulnerable communities are Indigenous. And so those systems need to be designed with Indigenous people, bringing in their understanding and their knowledge systems into this to make effective prediction systems.<\/p>\n It requires big changes, but if we don\u2019t start now, we\u2019re not going to get there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Pomeroy had only been back in Canmore, Alta., for two weeks, returning from a research trip in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":881614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-881613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=881613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/881614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=881613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=881613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=881613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Seen](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Glacier-85WEB.jpg\"\/)
Unstable glaciers pose a risk to humans. In 2012, the partial collapse of a glacier in Jasper National Park might have proven deadly, had it not happened late at night. Photo: Amber Bracken \/ The Narwhal<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Glacier-58WEB.jpg\"\/)
There are more than 30,000 glaciers in Canada, more than any other country. But hundreds have been lost to climate change in recent decades, and many more are expected to melt in the future. Photo: Amber Bracken \/ The Narwhal<\/p>\n![\"Dramatic](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Glacier-38WEB.jpg\"\/)
The frozen parts of the Earth are known as the cryosphere. The effects of it melting in Canada range from increased flooding to degraded water quality. Hydrologist John Pomeroy says limiting global warming by reducing emissions as quickly as possible is imperative to mitigate further damage. Photo: Amber Bracken \/ The Narwhal<\/p>\n