The Juneau Ice Field Research Project

D URING the past quarter of a century most observations on the extent of land and sea ice have indicated a definite amelioration of climate. We may be witnessing the last stages of what the late Francois E. Matthes has called The Little Ice Age, which began about the end of the sixteenth century. Professor H. W. Ahlmann, the well-known Scandinavian glaciologist, has stated: It is proved by climatological, oceanographical, glaciological, and biological facts that a climatic fluctuation is now going on. In high northern latitudes it expresses itself in an improvement of the temperature, which in the last decades has been the greatest during the last 200 years. In some parts of the Tropics, e.g. East Africa, there is desiccation, probably belonging to the same climatic fluctuation. This climatic change is the first one in the endless series of climatic variations and fluctuations in the past and coming history of the Earth, which we can study, measure and possibly also explain.' Referring more specifically to the role ofglaciology, he continues: are very sensitive to climatic changes... They are natural climatic recorders even where no meteorological stations exist. They also tell us the history of the climate from times before any scientific investigations of climates had begun. In the summer of 1941 the American Geographical Society, motivated in part by the almost world-wide reports of enormous shrinkage of glaciers, sent a small field party into Southeastern Alaska, par excellence a region for glacier study.2 One of the areas visited was Taku Inlet, where an unusually interesting situation exists. Four large glaciers flow southward into the Taku River Valley and terminate at or near sea level; Norris Glacier and the Twin Glaciers have been receding, but, strangely, Taku Glacier and its distributary, Hole-in-the-Wall Glacier, have been advancing. Yet all four

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