Abstract
In the summer of 1955, a floatplane flew a small group of American climbers to a lake near the edge of a massive icefield straddling the Continental Divide along the Yukon/Northwest Territories border in northern Canada. When the group saw the cluster of jagged peaks and sheer rock walls they were searching for, they were stunned. Emerging from the edges of the Brintnell/Bologna icefield was a 9,000-foot palisade of ice-polished granite that bore an uncanny resemblance to the craggy spires of Yosemite.
Into the eternal darkness, into fire and ice.
— Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
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Notes
- 1.
Climate Central, “Alaska Entering New Era for Wildfires,” research report, June 24, 2015, http://www.climatecentral.org/news/alaska-entering-new-era-for-wildfires-19146.
- 2.
Ryan Kelly et al., “Recent Burning of Boreal Forests Exceeds Fire Regime Limits of the Past 10,000 Years,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 110, no. 32 (August 6, 2013): 13055–60, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1305069110.
- 3.
Yongwon Kim et al., “Possible Effect of Boreal Wildfire Soot on Arctic Sea Ice and Alaska Glaciers,” Atmospheric Environment 39, no. 19 (2005): 3513–20.
- 4.
The wilderness includes approximately 19.7 million acres (8 million hectares) of low tundra communities, 760,000 acres (310,000 hectares) of unvegetated intertidal mud and sand flats, and 2,550 miles (4,100 kilometers) of shoreline broken by twenty-two large river mouths and thirteen bays. The extensive intertidal flats are adjacent to about 2.27 million acres (920,000 hectares) of wet, sedge-grass meadows that lie between the average high-tide line and the storm-tide line. See http://www.whsrn.org/site-profile/yukon-delta-nwr.
- 5.
Jennifer B. Korosi et al., “Broad-Scale Lake Expansion and Flooding Inundates Essential Wood Bison Habitat,” Nature Communications 8 (March 2017), doi: 10.1038/ncomms14510.
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© 2017 Edward Struzik
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Struzik, E. (2017). Agent of Change. In: Firestorm. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-819-0_10
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