Globe Climate: Wildfire ash speeds up glacier melt

Sierra Bein
The Globe and Mail
September 15, 2025

John Pomeroy is familiar with Peyto Glacier’s rapid melting.

He’s a distinguished professor and director of the Global Water Futures Observatories at the University of Saskatchewan, and has studied the ice mass in Banff National Park since 2008, visiting several times a year to adjust weather stations and photograph changes.

But on a helicopter trip through the Canadian Rockies to the glacier one year ago, Prof. Pomeroy and his team of scientists gasped – stunned to see how much it had transformed since even his previous visit.

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Wildfire ash is accelerating glacier melt in the Canadian Rockies

Andrea Woo
The Globe and Mail
September 5, 2025

As the helicopter turned toward Peyto Glacier, located in the Park Ranges of the Canadian Rockies, John Pomeroy and his team of scientists gasped.

Prof. Pomeroy, a distinguished professor and director of the Global Water Futures Observatories at the University of Saskatchewan, has studied the ice mass in Banff National Park since 2008, visiting several times a year to adjust weather stations and photograph changes.

He is familiar with the glacier’s rapid melting. It retreats tens of metres per year – 80 metres in 2021 alone. But on the helicopter ride last September, he was stunned to see how much it had transformed since even his previous visit…

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Let’s both celebrate – and worry about – our Great Lakes on World Lake Day

John Smol, Sapna Sharma and Steven Cooke
The Globe and Mail
August 27, 2025

Canada is blessed with over nine million lakes, leading to the perception that we have endless freshwater resources. However, Canadian lakes – like lakes around the world – are under increasing environmental threats from multiple stressors, such as pollution, land-cover changes and invasive species, among other factors, many of which are now amplified due to climate change and extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods and droughts.

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Listen – Canada’s “exceptional” drought from coast to coast to coast

The Current
with Matt Galloway
CBC Listen
August 25, 2025

Across Canada, 71 per cent of the country is abnormally dry or experiencing moderate to severe drought, according to the Canadian Drought Monitor. That includes places like Sunnyside, Newfoundland and Labrador, where the taps ran dry earlier this month. And in Nova Scotia, Farmer Amy Hill in Nova Scotia shares how the dry conditions are straining her farm. John Pomeroy, Director of the Global Water Futures program at the University of Saskatchewan, explains what’s driving these conditions and what Canada must do to prepare for a hotter, drier future.

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Soot from wildfires on Rocky Mountains glaciers affects Sask. water security

CKOM News
August 18, 2025

It has been a record season for wildfires in Saskatchewan, and while the smoke has a direct impact on people’s health, it is also affecting long term water security in the province.

Dr. John Pomeroy, director of the Centre for Hydrology at University of Saskatchewan (U of S) was a guest on The Evan Bray Show on Monday and described the impact on glaciers in the Rocky Mountains, which feed the South Saskatchewan River from which the province draws most of its water.

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(11:00 segment)

Frequent disasters expose climate risks to infrastructure in South Asia

Niranjan Shrestha and Sibi Arasu
The Associated Press
August 5, 2025

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Floods that damaged hydropower dams in Nepal and destroyed the main bridge connecting the country to China show the vulnerability of infrastructure and need for smart rebuilding in a region bearing the brunt of a warming planet, experts say.

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UPDATE: This story has also been reported on ABC News. Read here

Our Future Is on Thin Ice

John Pomeroy
Nature Alberta
June 18, 2025

In the 30 years since global leaders first gathered to discuss how to limit climate change under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Earth has lost close to 8 trillion tonnes of ice1 and the atmospheric concentration of the potent greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, has risen from 350 to 430 parts per million2 — a level last experienced about 2.5 million years ago at the beginning of the Pleistocene Epoch in which humans later evolved.

As a result of greenhouse gas concentration increases, temperatures are rising quickly and our weather is becoming more extreme. We now stand on the cusp of major losses to Earth’s major polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. These changes are happening much sooner than many scientists’ previous worst-case scenarios.3 They spell the end for both low-lying nations and coastal regions, as maps of coastlines are redrawn by rising seas,4 as well as for wildlife such as polar bears, seals, and Antarctic penguins that have evolved to thrive in these frozen zones.

But they are also set to strike all of us, much closer to home. And it’s hard to imagine anywhere that will feel the force of these changes as acutely as Alberta…

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