[Editor’s note: ‘Climate Hope: Stories of Action in an Age of Global Crisis,’ out now from Douglas & McIntyre, is a deeply researched, globe-spanning book about the work that people have done to identify the causes and impacts of climate change — and, perhaps most importantly, the work that’s being done to address climate change. In this excerpt, author David Geselbracht prepares to visit the retreating Illecillewaet Glacier, in B.C., the site of Canada’s earliest formal glacier study.]
On July 15, 1913, Mary Vaux hiked through spruce and hemlock until she found the long, white snout of the Illecillewaet Glacier. She had been there many times before, observing the ancient ice form, and as she wrote to her father that night, the “signs of recession are very evident.”
Vaux was obsessed with this glacier, nestled in B.C.’s Selkirk Mountains, and she was particularly intrigued by its non-stop contraction.
In a note the next day, now archived in the Whyte Museum in Banff, she again exclaimed, “The Glacier sure is very much changed, and has receded a lot.”
Finally, on her last day trudging up and over the ice, Vaux once again wrote her father: “I have had two hard days on the glacier, but the work is all done now, and everything is in order.”
What exactly was the “work” Vaux was doing, and why was it now complete? Vaux was not just admiring the blue-tinted sprawl of ice; she was on a mission.
Her first visit was in 1887, at the age of 27, and she would soon trek thousands of kilometres almost every year from Philadelphia, by rail, horseback, ferry and foot, until she reached the Illecillewaet Glacier (an Okanagan First Nations word meaning “swift water,” applied to the river before the glacier). When she finally arrived, the work would start. For nearly a quarter century, she studied the flow and recession of the glacier, documenting its dynamics in detail and, despite not having a post-secondary degree, publishing her findings under her own name. Hers was the first formal glacier study conducted in Canada.
The legacy of images and measurements she left behind over a century ago make the Illecillewaet one of the longest-studied glaciers in North America. At a time when women couldn’t vote, Vaux broke barriers in a field dominated by men. Driven by curiosity, a passion for the outdoors and a belief that scientific observation of the natural world mattered, her work offers a window into the past, when glaciology was still a nascent science. Her efforts also provide a bridge to the present, where climate change has shifted our understanding of glaciers and their critical yet vanishing place in the world.
Beauty and astonishment
Vaux’s father was George Vaux Sr., a Philadelphia businessman who once nearly drowned on a disastrous transatlantic crossing to Europe. Following that trip, he vowed never to attempt sea travel again, and also forbade his children from making the crossing themselves.
The same year that Vaux graduated from high school, her mother, Sarah, passed away, and the responsibility of housekeeping and caring for her father fell on Vaux’s shoulders, dashing any chance of university studies.
When the Canadian Pacific Railway was built — carving into the recently created Glacier National Park, where the Illecillewaet sits — it brought not only a travel alternative to Europe but an outlet that nurtured Vaux’s curiosity in science, art and the outdoors. As she once wrote, “Sometimes I feel that I can hardly wait till the time comes to escape from the city life, to the free air of the everlasting hills.”
Surrounded by jutting peaks, the Illecillewaet spans six square kilometres and, from its upper end to its toe, descends roughly 1,000 metres. In 1887, Vaux and her family visited for the first time and were spellbound by its beauty.
When they returned a few years later, however, they were overcome by a new feeling: astonishment. The glacier had drastically retreated.
From here, these Philadelphia Quakers, who would come each summer to vacation, pursued a study of the Illecillewaet that would last over two decades. Mary’s brother William, an engineer, first led the efforts, guiding Mary and her other brother, George Jr., in the proper techniques. But when William died in 1907 and George’s law practice became too busy for him to travel, the research was left to Mary, who saw it as her responsibility.
Each year, using lines of rope and large boulders as fixed points, she measured the glacial recession. In a 1911 paper published in the Canadian Alpine Journal she wrote, “The distance from Rock C to the nearest ice was 426 feet [130 metres], thus making the recession for the year 60 feet [18 metres].”
At the same time that glacial ice recedes, though, the entire mass also shifts downward — hence the common phrase “rivers of ice.” So, in addition to measuring the recession, she also measured this flow.
Vaux placed specially made steel plates on the glacier’s surface, and the following year she would hunt them down, using transit measurements to then calculate the average rate of flow. Between 1909 and 1910, according to Vaux’s calculations, the downward glacial flow rate was 3.74 inches (9.5 centimetres) a day.
Finding these metal plates, which were painted red, could be tricky. And sometimes they went rogue. In the summer of 1910, plate #8 couldn’t be recovered, Vaux wrote, because it was “hidden by great mounds of ice, with deep crevasses between.” To make things easier for the next year, she would put the plates “in a more favorable position.”
It’s hard to believe this was how Vaux vacationed. Tromping over glaciers with heavy equipment and spending her days locating plates and measuring distances could hardly have been relaxing. And this wasn’t the least of it.
Arguably her most valuable research was the photographs she took over many years. She used a cumbersome 19th-century camera that weighed nearly 45 kilograms, and it required two pack horses to slog gear up the mountain slopes. Like she used fixed-point rocks, she also used fixed-point camera locations, returning to the same spots each year to capture the glacier; the photos, gauzy and faded, show the ice inexorably receding and the white tongue withdrawing up the valley. It’s these photos, contrasted to those taken a century later, that provide remarkable documentary evidence of the Illecillewaet’s retreat.
Each generation, humans decimate great swaths of forests and pull mountains of fish from the seas. And for the next generation, a new normal sets in: smaller trees, fewer fish. This is known as “shifting baseline syndrome,” a term coined in 1995 by UBC marine biologist Dr. Daniel Pauly, where successive generations know only what they have, forgetting what once was. Photography can be a powerful check to this collective amnesia. Think about images of the huge cod that Grandpa once caught or the giant cedars that Grandma played in. Or, from Vaux’s old pictures, images of a plump white glacier cresting the valley brim and flowing to its bottom — much longer than it is now — help remind us how much has changed.
And yet, pictures can disguise more complicated stories. They tell us what we see but not always why we see it. The late 1800s was the age of the amateur, a time when non-professionals could significantly contribute to scientific advancement.
Through sheer dedication and sense of purpose, Vaux and her brothers became some of the first glaciologists in North America, providing invaluable data. In the ensuing century, the knowledge base expanded — the recession Vaux captured is now better understood, which has given us a greater appreciation for the complexity of these blankets of ice.
Anthropogenic causes
We depend on glaciers in myriad ways.
In some parts of the world, like northern India, farmers irrigate their crops with glacial meltwater. In the Andes, countries like Peru and Colombia rely on this water for hydro power. In the Selkirk Mountains, glacial water helps regulate the temperature of rivers, an important factor for the spawning success of many fish species. Around the world, hundreds of millions of people rely on glacial melt for their drinking water.
Our societies are enmeshed in the hydrological cycle in which glaciers play an integral role. For humans in North America, there was never a time when glaciers were not part of the landscape.
For the past two million years, colossal swaths of ice expanded and contracted across the continent. The peak of the last major glaciation was around 20,000 years ago, when most of Canada was covered. The ice reached as far south as Cincinnati, Ohio, and in some areas was almost four kilometres thick. Think of the ice wall in Game of Thrones, but higher. When these massive glaciers eventually melted away, it enabled the First Peoples to travel farther and flourish throughout much of the continent.
As the glaciers advanced and retreated, they warped and denuded the landscape, scooping out deep valleys, moving giant boulders and sculpting sharp mountain ridges. During the last major melt, glacial runoff filled up sea-like basins to form the Great Lakes. Since then, a set of shorter warming and cooling periods occurred, with glaciers expanding and contracting at a smaller scale. At the end of the 19th century, when Vaux measured the retreat of the Illecillewaet Glacier, she witnessed the melt after one of these shorter, cooler stretches, sometimes called the Little Ice Age.
But how does the retreat she recorded square with climate change? Is the melt we see today simply a continuation, or is it caused by the greenhouse effect?
In the period when Vaux hiked over moraines and cerulean-tinged ice, very little global ice loss from glaciers was linked to anthropogenic causes. By the 1990s, it was closer to 100 per cent.
As Gerard Roe and colleagues explained in a 2021 paper in The Cryosphere, humans were now causing “essentially 100 per cent of the observed mass loss.”
In other words, while Vaux witnessed a historic glacial recession mixed with human-caused impacts, the human signal — or “anthropogenic forcing,” as glaciologists put it — is today much stronger.
Humans are unequivocally heating the planet, and, like ice cubes on a summer sidewalk, our glaciers are disappearing before our eyes. This brings many consequences, including the rivers of excess glacial meltwater now flowing into our oceans and raising sea levels.
Similar to many of the 200,000 other rapidly melting glaciers around the world, the Illecillewaet is shrivelling.
On a sunny summer day, I decided to visit the Illecillewaet and witness these changes first-hand.
Excerpted from pages 8 to 14 of ‘Climate Hope’ by David Geselbracht (Douglas & McIntyre, 2024). Reprinted with permission by the publisher.
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