Sandi Doughton in the Seattle Times: The fallout from Mount Rainier's shrinking glaciers is beginning to roll downhill, and nowhere is the impact more striking than on the volcano's west side. …As receding glaciers expose crumbly slopes, vast amounts of gravel and sediment are being sluiced into the rivers that flow from the Northwest's tallest peak. Much of the material sweeps down in rain-driven slurries called debris flows, like those that repeatedly have slammed Mount Rainier National Park's Westside Road.…Inside park boundaries, rivers choked with gravel are threatening to spill across roads, bump up against the bottom of bridges and flood the historic complex at Longmire. Downstream, communities in King and Pierce counties are casting a wary eye at the volcano in their backyard. There are already signs that riverbeds near Auburn and Puyallup are rising. As glaciers continue to pull back, the result could be increased flood danger across the Puget Sound lowlands for decades.
"There is significant evidence that things are changing dramatically at Mount Rainier," said Tim Abbe, of the environmental consulting firm ENTRIX. "We need to start planning for it now," added Abbe, who helps analyze Mount Rainier's river systems.
Similar dynamics are playing out at all the region's major glaciated peaks, from Mount Jefferson to Mount Baker, said research hydrologist Gordon Grant, of the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station in Corvallis, Ore…..
Emmons Glacier in Mount Rainier National Park, shot by Walter Siegmund, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
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