The Valerie Glacier is sliding toward the ocean, fast. Over the course of 18 days in July, the glacier galloped a whopping 150 feet— the length of four school buses parked end-to-end.
With it went a small research camp, made up of a cluster of tents pitched under jagged peaks. The scientists were there to study the Valerie and whether it might be possible to slow its disappearance into the sea.
As the team donned snowshoes and skis to head into the field, Melenda Lekanof, the project’s community liaison, took in the seemingly endless glaciated landscape. She said she was thinking about her ancestors – the Ginéix Kwáan or Kwáashk’ikwáan, of the Copper River region – migrating through here centuries ago.
“It’s breathtaking, and it’s a bit overwhelming, because this is part of who I am,” said Lekanof, who is from Yakutat and is Tlingit and Aleut.
But she’s also worried about the future. The world’s glaciers have lost about 5% of their ice since 2000 as temperatures rise with climate change. And Alaska’s glaciers are disappearing even more quickly.
“I don't know if this is going to be here in my time,” Lekanof said. She added: “We need to know what’s going on.”
The research team hopes to shed light on that question and others over the next few years. But the project has a much larger, more controversial ambition: Seeing if it’s possible to save tidewater glaciers by making them slow down.
Behind the effort is a California-based nonprofit called the Institute for Glacier Stewardship. If such an engineering feat could work on the Valerie Glacier, they contend, it may also work on the world’s largest ice sheets, potentially delaying a catastrophic rise in sea levels.
“We are going to lose a huge amount of ice on this planet,” said Alex Luebke, the Institute’s founder and CEO. “We're trying desperately to figure out what we could do to hold on to some of it.”
Humans have intervened in natural processes, including glacier loss, throughout history. But manipulating glacier behavior on this scale would be something new. Whether it should be attempted — or could even work — is hotly debated.
Skeptics say humanity should focus squarely on decarbonization instead of grand ideas they think are impractical and likely to be ineffective, anyway. Some worry that glacial engineering could even backfire.
“I just don't think there is any realistic chance this is ever going to work,” said Martin Truffer, a glaciology expert with the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Proponents of glacial engineering agree that reducing planet-warming emissions is critical. But they also say that a dangerous amount of ice loss and sea level rise is already guaranteed. As they see it, that means scientists have a responsibility to at least try to intervene before it’s too late.
“If we don't buy time, none of it – none of it – matters,” said Luebke. “And so the question became, how do you buy time?”
The water under the glacier
Setting up and running the camp, which was more than 3,000 feet above sea level on the heavily crevassed glacier, meant ferrying load after load of people and gear by helicopter from Yakutat, more than 40 miles away.
Twelve different people lived on the glacier this summer, shuffling between the field, sleep tents, a cook tent and a portable toilet. Red flags planted around camp marked where it was and wasn’t safe to venture.
“This was the only little space on the glacier that was safe enough for us to do operations,” said Cecelia Mortenson, a mountain guide hired to manage safety and logistics. “Literally, if we walk 200 meters that way, we start hitting crevasse after crevasse after crevasse.”
The research happened about a mile from camp. Seismic and acoustic sensors, radar systems and fiber optic cables dotted the glacier, making it possible for the researchers to look beyond the surface and measure its size, shape, movement and more.
“Our current knowledge of Valerie is kind of superficial,” said Slawek Tulaczyk, the project’s head glaciologist. “We don't know, for instance, how thick it is.”
They were also studying the water that runs under the glacier.
The so-called subglacial hydrology is important because it helps determine how quickly glaciers move. Tulaczyk compared the process, known as basal sliding, to your average car engine. The water, like engine oil, provides a slick layer of lubrication that reduces friction and allows movement.
“It's basically a block of ice that's sliding over the top of underlying geology,” said Tulaczyk, who researches ice sheet collapse and sea level rise at the University of California Santa Cruz.
The idea is to study that hydrology and then examine whether it’s possible to somehow remove or reduce the water to bring the glacier to a near-halt.
“If you think about it, it's just water management. We're really good at water management,” said Luebke, the CEO. “I could pump it out. I could redirect it. I could freeze it.”
A glacier that stopped on its own
That idea didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s from the other side of the world.
The Antarctic ice sheet is made up of fast-flowing rivers of ice that move about three meters every day. But one of them, known as the Kamb Ice Stream, is thought to have drastically slowed down about 200 years ago.
Glaciologists say the Kamb likely halted because much of the water underneath it naturally diverted elsewhere — essentially hitting the brakes.
“It kind of stopped, in spite of the overall fact that we have a warming atmosphere and ocean prompting glaciers around the world to do the opposite, to speed up their motion,” Tulaczyk said.
The hope is to mimic that scenario on the Valerie to prove it could be done elsewhere. But there are also reasons to want to slow down this specific glacier.
The Valerie runs parallel to a glacier known as the Hubbard. For decades, the Hubbard has threatened to surge toward Gilbert Point and cut off Russell Fjord, turning it into a lake. That could lead to major flooding closer to town.
Early on, the institute held a series of local meetings, including at the senior center, to ensure the community supported the project and would benefit from it. Residents told them that a possible blockage of Russell Fjord was a major concern.
“If that closes off permanently, it reroutes an entire watershed out of a really small river,” said Truffer, who co-authored a paper about when the glacier temporarily dammed the waterway in 2002. “It will destroy the entire steelhead fishery in the Situk, which is one of the richest in the world.”
One hypothesis holds that Valerie pushes the front of the Hubbard Glacier toward Gilbert Point, which would block the fjord. The researchers want to test that theory, and whether slowing the Valerie could solve the problem.
“The community gave permission to research Valerie,” said Meda DeWitt, who sits on the Institute's board and is the president of the local Native corporation, Yak-Tat K̲wáan, Inc.
She added: “It's been this really beautiful process of bringing together traditional ecological knowledge with Western technology. A lot of groups try to do this, but they miss some key elements, and they fail.”
The idea goes that, if it worked on the Valerie, something similar could be done on glaciers that play a crucial role in sea level rise, like the West Antarctic ice sheet.
“The physics is pretty straightforward,” said Luebke, who has worked as a technologist for X Development and launched a few nonprofits. “It's not, like, really hard. It's friction, it's mass, it's energy.”
Truffer disagreed. He said studying the Valerie is “totally worthwhile,” and that most research so far has focused on other nearby glaciers despite prolonged local concern about Gilbert Point. But he doesn’t think engineering the Valerie could realistically stop a closure there.
“That, to me, is a total dead dream,” he said.
A ‘radioactive’ debate
The debate over the idea suggests it isn’t really that straightforward. Tulaczyk called the issue “radioactive” in the scientific community.
“If I were a young person trying to start my career as a researcher in glaciology, I don't think I would touch it,” he said. “Fortunately, I'm not young anymore.”
The research team may be in the minority, but they’re not entirely alone. Another group, called the Arête Glacier Initiative, hopes to demonstrate “one or more strategies” for ice-sheet stabilization within the next decade.
And a 2024 white paper published by the University of Chicago called for more research into glacial interventions. The paper encouraged more research into several paths, including managing the water under glaciers and building berms along the seabed to block warm water from circulating under ice sheets.
“We are proposing such an ambitious program because we see examining options for reducing sea-level rise from ice-sheet melting as a global imperative,” wrote the five authors, which included one of Tulaczyk’s former students.
The next year, more than 40 researchers from around the world penned their own paper slamming what they called "dangerous geoengineering” ideas. Those included manipulating water under glaciers by pumping it out, cooling it or diverting it.
“Many of these challenges require entirely new engineering approaches that would take many years, if not decades, to develop, even with unlimited resources,” the authors wrote.
They concluded that the idea is “scientifically flawed and likely to be logistically impossible.” They wrote that drilling into the glacier could introduce contaminants, while pumping water would require immense power demands and highly sophisticated water management.
Think: converting the water to snow using machines like the ones used by ski resorts. Or laying out a flexible pipe on the glacier’s surface to send the water into the fjord.
Those are among the ideas that gave Truffer pause.
“I'm good friends with Slawek, but I don't think this has any chance of ever being implemented on a large scale,” Truffer said.
“I mean, when you flew up, you saw how crevassed that glacier is, right?” he added. “You’d have to lay pipe across this extremely crevassed glacier surface that is constantly moving.”
Exploring every avenue
Tulaczyk and Luebke emphasized that it’s still early days — that a range of strategies is still on the table, and it could take years to gather enough information about the Valerie to even consider moving forward.
Luebke also acknowledged that their plan might not work and could even have unintended consequences.
“You can always come up with all the scenarios of, we go to try to slow down the glacier and we speed it up somehow,” Luebke said. “One hundred percent, there is a risk of that.”
But they say it’s always possible to correct course, and that tackling a new idea, however ambitious, is better than waiting for the world to decarbonize.
“There's no chance in hell we will reach net zero fossil fuel emissions by 2050, as some people hoped,” Tulaczyk said.
Lekanof, the local liaison, also served as the project’s Indigenous knowledge partner. She says the community has a lot to gain just from learning more about the glacier.
“We are salmon people,” she said. “One of the things the elders always said, and you'll find it in all the history books – the reason why we have the salmon runs is because of our glaciers.”
Her response was more cautious when asked about drilling into the glacier or trying to change its behavior. Whether the project moves forward will ultimately be up to the community, she said, and she anticipates loads of questions.
“Because we don't look at it as just a science thing,” she said. “This is also one of the oldest things that we find sacred. And that glacier is what keeps us, is what takes care of us.”
Still, Lekanof added, “We would be failing if we didn’t look at every avenue.”
