Pirate's Cove

I love when they go all sciency

Mount Rainier may be shrinking due to climate change: Study

Mount Rainer, the active stratovolcano located in Washington state, is likely shrinking due to climate change, according to new research.

The loss of snow and ice is one of the most visible signs of human-amplified climate change in mountainous regions worldwide. In the contiguous United States, five locations have maintained year-round frozen peaks over the past century — all of them in Washington state.

However, rising global temperatures in recent decades are threatening to change that, not only by accelerating ice decline, but also by altering the elevations of major mountains, including the popular hiking and tourist destination Mount Rainier.

Since the mid-20th century, the summit of Mount Rainier has likely declined more than 20 feet due to snow and ice melt, according to research recently published in the journal Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research (AAAR).

May. Likely. Likely.

Is it or isn’t it? If you’re going to make the claim one would think there would be actual scientific facts and data.

Researchers used satellite data, laser measurements and historical photographs to track how the five ice-capped summits have changed since the 1950s, employing new measurement techniques that offer unprecedented accuracy.

“Measurements taken on site used base stations around the state to correct the data. So, it gets the number down to the nearest inch,” Eric Gilbertson, associate teaching professor at Seattle University and co-author of the study, said in a statement released with the study. (snip)

Studying these impacts is challenging because there are currently no comprehensive databases, historical or contemporary, that track ice-capped summits.

So, there are no actual databases to truly measure it against? And there couldn’t be other causes, such as that we’re in a typical Holocene warm period, and Rainier is a volcano? Nah, your fault.