Johns Hopkins Glacier

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Glacier Bay in Alaska was all glacier, and no bay. Today, however, cruise ships can travel sixty-five miles inside the U.S. Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve (itself a part of a 25-million-acre UNESCO World Heritage Site) to reach its farthest tidewater glaciers.

Johns Hopkins Glacier

Near the end of that passage, they enter Johns Hopkins Inlet….. and see a glacier that is about a mile (1.6 km) wide, and 250 feet (~75 m) deep. U.S. Park Rangers who boarded our vessel described it as the “most beautiful” one in the entire region — and indeed it really is quite spectacular!

Harry Fielding Reid, a geophysicist who was educated and later taught at the institution for 35 years, named it the Johns Hopkins Glacier in 1893…. & we reached it by passing Reid Glacier, named six years later (by another expedition) for the scientist himself. Reid’s early works were all about glaciers, but he shifted his focus after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and developed elastic-rebound theory to describe earthquake mechanics…. a cornerstone of today’s geological science. A National Academy of Sciences biographical memoir notes he was “ahead of his time,” and might well be considered the “first American geophysicist.”

Although Glacier Bay holds the record for the fastest-ever-recorded glacial retreat, Johns Hopkins Glacier itself has actually been advancing (fed by snowfall in the Fairweather Mountains)….. a nice, contrarian metaphor, no doubt!