A Landscape in Flux

Full chapter from my independent research: "Reading” Glacier Bay: a landscape of cultural and physical glaciation from the Little Ice Age to the 21st century"

A beached, lonely iceberg in decay.

The story of Glacier Bay is a conflicted one, where the death of one being through melting makes way for the fecundity of many others.

The relationship is infinitely sensitive and involves nature in its many forms, including ice, trees, climate, and animals- both human and non-human. Where one advances in the bay, the others retreat in response. The ghosts of the once great ice mountains, human cultures passed, and old growth forests are met with the coming of new life and the regrowth of that which is simply returning. Glacier Bay is always in flux.

         I saw this flux in the glaciers; where they used to be calving into the sea, they now are up on the land. I felt it on my legs when I would brush up against Devil’s Club, now growing where it never could. I even saw it in the water itself, in some places littered with massive bergs from the retreating tidewater faces, which every so often released a bone shattering, profound crack that radiated off the vertical fjord walls, sending a shiver straight to my toes. I was always met with a strange inclination to watch them float on, ever so slowly, just to see where they end up.

Icebergs float out to the ocean. Eastern arm of Glacier Bay, 2016.

Enormous cruise ships filled with tourists behind camera lenses float from end to end of Glacier Bay, emitting noise and air pollution. Sixteen years before my arrival in the bay, a humpback whale with unique white markings on her tail fondly named “Snow” was struck and killed by a cruise liner traveling at unsafe speeds. Because of the “Whale 68 Articulation Project,” her skeleton has been displayed near the National Park visitor’s center and serves as a reminder of the fragility of Glacier Bay’s wildlife. Guests walk underneath her massive tailbone like they would a Woolly Mammoth at the museum of natural history, envisioning layers of flesh and then skin submerging into a pre-historic frigid sea, vanishing from sight.

But Snow swam in Glacier Bay’s icy waters two decades ago, not in some prehistoric sea.

A fluke photo of Snow two weeks before being struck and killed. Note the white markings on the tail for which Snow was named (National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/glba/learn/nature/whale-68-articulation-project.htm).

That Snow’s bones lay a mere one hundred yards from her home, whose waters still lap at the same shores, is chilling. Snow’s skeleton was never put to rest. In gazing up at the bones of a Woolly Mammoth in a museum, the viewer can breathe easier knowing that it lived in a far away place, both in space and time, from where they stand. Therefore, its death exists behind a curtain that separates the reality of its species’ extinction from the world of humans that, at least in part, played a role in it. But this barrier is shattered in the display of Snow’s bones. There is no curtain between her remains and where she once swam, neither in time or space, and so it makes the human viewer tremendously uncomfortable. It is almost as if she is somberly watching over her family that swims past her in the bay. The monument is a symbol for the sensitive and deadly relationship between Glacier Bay’s inhabitants that is constantly shifting, dramatically so, faster than some of us can possibly imagine.