Anchorage Daily News

Massive Hubbard Glacier is rumbling forward this week and threatens to again choke off the entrance to Russell Fiord in Southeast Alaska.

Park rangers and glaciologists who flew over Hubbard on Thursday and Friday said the channel between the glacier and land at Gilbert Point had narrowed to about 50 yards. Ahead of it, the glacier was bulldozing a deep gravelly moraine.

Water was still flowing between the fjord and Disenchantment Bay on Friday. But that could change suddenly, as it did in late May 1986 when the glacier blocked the channel for more than four months and trapped harbor seals and porpoises.

That set off a weeks-long but generally unproductive effort to rescue the marine mammals, which were eventually freed naturally when the pent-up water behind the ice dam suddenly collapsed it.

Jacqueline Lott, a ranger with Wrangell St. Elias National Park, said she overflew the area Friday and thinks Hubbard more likely than not will begin a slow retreat instead of blocking up the fjord this year.

"We don't have a closure now, and we're at the apex of the season when the glacier normally makes a retreat," Lott said. "It advances in the spring, and then about this time of year it begins to calve, and there is still room for it to calve. We're going to be watching it."

But Martin Truffer, a scientist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks who happened to be in nearby Yakutat this week for a convention of glaciologists when the Hubbard took its run, isn't so sure.

"I think it will probably actually close this year, but probably not for good," Truffer said. He overflew the glacier Thursday.

In the long run, though, the Hubbard is almost certain to close off Russell Fiord as it continues a century-old advance, he said.

The geology of Yakutat, about 35 miles south of Hubbard's face today, shows that at one time the glacier rode over the land where the village is today, Truffer said. That was somewhere around A.D. 1300, before the glacier began an ancient retreat. More recently, Hubbard has begun advancing again.

A glacier blockage of Russell Fiord would be bad not only for trapped seals, but for the people who live in Yakutat. With no outlet, the fjord would be a trapped inland lake, filling ever higher until annual runoff spilled out the other end into the Situk River. The Situk is a renowned clearwater steelhead and salmon stream, which supports an important fishery.

"That would pretty much wipe out all factions of our economy," said city Assemblyman Casey Mapes.

Air taxi pilots have been bringing back depressing news about the glacier's advance, Mapes said. "Just the last few days, it's really been on the move. ... (People fear) it looks like the beginning of the end ... As if our commercial fishing isn't bad enough, with the prices the way they are. With the economy down, people are feeling a little low. This is almost the icing on the cake."

Supervisors for the Tongass National Forest are flying over the glacier daily and working on contingency plans in case the fjord is blocked off, spokesman Dennis Neill said.

"One of my co-workers was there a month ago, and (the channel) was 250 to 300 yards wide," he said. "Now it's down to about 50 yards. The reality is, it's not very far."

Unlike landlocked glaciers, which are generally retreating in a trend many scientists believe linked to global warming, tidewater glaciers follow their own independent cycles of advance and retreat, Truffer said.

"They don't really care about the climate."

Reporter Don Hunter can be reached at dhunter@adn.com or 907 257-4349.