Warmer weather is leading to vanishing winters in North America’s Great Lakes

Marguerite Xenopoulos, Trent University
Michael R. Twiss, Algoma University
The Conversation
October 16, 2025

Fifty years ago, winter didn’t just visit the Great Lakes — it took up residence. If you blinked too slowly, your eyelashes froze together. Standing on the ice at the edge of Lake Superior, just after an early January snowstorm, everything was white and still, except for the lake. The wind had swept across it revealing ice cracked along thunderous fractures…

Read Here

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.

Read Here

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…

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…

Read Here

Global Action Urged to Preserve Glaciers – and Humanity – at High-Level Dushanbe Conference

Global Water Futures News
June 4, 2025

Prof. John Pomeroy, University of Saskatchewan, participated in the High-Level International Conference on Glaciers’ Preservation where scientific, financial, and world leaders issued the Dushanbe Glacier Declaration, calling for urgent global climate action to preserve glaciers and safeguard water security for billions.

Read Here

‘Exceptionally large late season storm’ needed to bring mountain snow levels in Banff, Kananaskis to normal

Cathy Ellis
Rocky Mountain Outlook
April 24, 2025

BANFF – The snowpack shortage in the mountains could pose dangerous conditions this summer.

Canmore’s John Pomeroy, one of the world’s leading snow and ice hydrology experts, said the snow water equivalent is hundreds of millimetres below normal for this time of year, generally at between 65 and 85 per cent of normal for high elevation snowpacks in the Bow River Basin and Kananaskis Country…

Read Here

Water experts on edge as another dry summer heats up in southern Alberta

David Bell
CBC News
April 15, 2025

Prominent hydrologists are sounding the alarm as another dry summer in southern Alberta — with the possibility of water restrictions — is coming into focus.

Water levels are low. Really low.

“The snowpacks in the mountain headwaters of the Bow River, the Oldman River, Red Deer River and North Saskatchewan River are generally extremely low, some of the lowest I’ve ever seen,” John Pomeroy told CBC News in a Tuesday interview.

Read Here