From the air, you can see only a river of grey-brown mud where an actual glacier river ran until this summer
ATLIN, B.C., Canada - Frigid meltwater from the glacier, part of the Juneau Icefield, normally flows into Atlin Lake at Sloko Inlet and Llewellyn Inlet. Now the Sloko source has run dry. A neighbour of Thayer's, John Lyons, visited the site the day after he returned and described what had happened.
These shows the glacial rivers feeding a large lake straddling the Yukon-British Columbia border has dried up, hikers say, turning a normally fast-running watercourse into a muddy field strewn with icebergs.
One of the glacial rivers feeding a large lake straddling the Yukon-British Columbia border has dried up, hikers say, turning a normally fast-running watercourse into a muddy field strewn with icebergs.- "We were able to walk right into the river bed and stand among the 60-foot icebergs that are grounded now," said Diana Thayer of Atlin, B.C., who came across the phenomenon while hiking near the Llewellyn Glacier along the Sloko Inlet trail in late August.
- "The photographs were spectacular, it just seemed the plug had been pulled on a bathtub " he said. "You see where the bergs had been dragged along the bottom and you could see the drag marks in the mud from all the various icebergs."
Thayer said Atlin Lake, which is British Columbia's largest natural lake and extends its northern tip into Yukon, has already "dropped about 50 feet and perhaps is still draining." Lyons believes an ice bridge has dammed Sloko Inlet, forcing all the meltwater into Llewellyn Inlet.
"The maps will have to be redrawn a bit because there's no more river there," he said.
Atlin residents weren't the only ones caught off guard by the shift. Icefield researchers working in the area this summer found normally dry walking trails to the Llewellyn Inlet flooded with chest-deep water.
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