This Alaskan glacier holds back billions of gallons of water. Until it doesn’t.
A bus crosses over the Mendenhall River on Aug. 8 in Juneau. Mendenhall Glacier is seen on the horizon. (Christopher S. Miller for The Washington Post)
By Joshua Partlow, Washington Post
JUNEAU, Alaska — On the morning of the flood, Amy Ballard arranged her twins, Brighton and Broderick, on a hummingbird-and-butterflyblanket for their photo. The note between their smiling faces read: “We are 7 months old today.”
It had been a tough year for Ballard, an elementary school teacher and single mom. She spent months on bed rest in Anchorage, followed by weeks for her infants in intensive care. But she was backin her third-floor condo overlooking the Mendenhall River, a tranquil, glacier-fed waterway that coursed through her wooded neighborhood before flowing out to sea.
By the end of that sunny Saturday in early August, Ballard had watched the Mendenhall transform into a terrifying torrent of gray glacial silt that ripped down towering fir trees, devoured dozens of feet of riverbank and washed away neighbors’ homes. That evening, sherecorded the scene from her balcony, her voice almost drowned out by the roar of the water: “This may or may not be the last video I get to take from my porch,” she said.
This torrent of meltwater — normally held back by the giant glacier looming above Juneau — known as a glacial outburst flood, dwarfed any that have occurred since the phenomenon began here a dozen years ago.
The destruction has exposed just how unpredictable these floods can be, as glaciers around the world recede amid warming temperatures. Each year, more than a half-million people visit the Mendenhall Glacier, and scientists have a detailed understanding of how meltwater builds up and then pours out of it.
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