00:00We come here today to bury Clark Glacier and remember its part in our state and our country.
00:11So thank you good people for coming here this solemn day.
00:14This is happening here in the United States too. Our glaciers are disappearing. In Glacier National Park we have, I think they've lost 30% of their glaciers there.
00:36This should be a major concern to the people of the United States and particularly the people living in Oregon and Washington Pacific Northwest.
01:07So many hundreds, hundreds, thousands of people climb this mountain a year. And from the trailhead it'd be normally the first glacier you'd see.
01:13We went in late August this year to check on the glacier and see if it still was a glacier.
01:18And from just driving up the road towards the base of this volcano, I'm like, we don't have to climb it. There's no glacier there.
01:24To give you an idea of the change, when the glacier was officially mapped in the United States in the 1950s and officially named, that glacier was the size of about 70 U.S. football fields.
01:43Now it is down to less than seven football fields.
01:54In the case of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, I think that the retreat of glaciers and their loss is our biggest signal we have here of global warming's impact on us.
02:19Our glaciers are directly tied to maintaining salmon fisheries and hydroelectric dams, irrigation, and we also have a large winter sports ski industry where they utilize the glaciers as well or utilize the snowpack that feeds the glaciers.
02:36And people just aren't aware that this is occurring.
02:49We went this summer to do the first count of how many glaciers remain in Oregon since the 1950s.
03:06After World War II, the U.S. Geological Survey developed a very good set of maps for the United States and they've updated those every decade or so, but they haven't done that for Oregon.
03:19So it's been 70 years since anybody counted the glaciers in Oregon.
03:23That's what we went out to do.
03:24So we went and visited all the glaciers in Oregon and checked to see if there still were glaciers.
03:30Clark Glacier is more of our representative glacier of this one that's lost.
03:35There are many other glaciers that have disappeared in Oregon as well.
03:38It's roughly, probably more than 25%, less than 50% have disappeared.
03:44I have two young kids and what makes me more sad is that these are things that I've enjoyed and appreciated and loved and they won't get that chance to as well.
03:56It is like losing some part of your experience in life and that's just gone.
04:02If we raise awareness in the Pacific Northwest that here's where we're seeing the impacts of global warming the strongest.
04:09Here's where our impacts of our carbon usage are causing the most effect.
04:14We can maybe make a regional change like, oh, we don't want to lose the glaciers.
04:25For more information visit www.fema.gov
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