Ten percent of the land area of the Earth today is covered by glaciers. Of the glacier-covered landscape, the Antarctic Ice Sheet makes up 84% of the total and the Greenland Ice Sheet accounts for another 11% (Aber, 1997). If you view Walker's (1997) interesting depiction of North America from The Living Earth website you will see that any icefields or smaller glaciers pale in size comparison to the immense ice sheets. However, humans don't usually have the opportunity to view the Earth from the required perspective to see this enormity and so we are duly impressed with icefields and glaciers!

The Juneau Icefield is the largest icefield in Alaska and the 5th largest in North America. The Juneau Icefield is one of two icefields straddling the Coast Mountains of southeastern Alaska and adjacent British Columbia. The 1,500 square mile icefield extends 100 miles between the Skagway and Taku Rivers and is up to 2,000 feet thick (KTOO, 1987; Miller and Knight, 1967). Molenaar's (1993) beautiful map of the Glacier Bay and Juneau Icefield Region shows fjords and glacial troughs, such as the Lynn Canal, Taku Inlet, and Atlin Lake, surrounding the Juneau Icefield area.

Approximately 100 feet of snow fall each year on the Juneau Icefield. Many glaciers at the higher elevations continue to grow thicker while most of those at the lower elevations are thinning and receding. One of the most notable exceptions to this is the Taku Glacier which has been advancing since 1890, recently at a rate of a few hundred feet per year (Conner and O'Haire, 1996), crushing trees in its path and calving into the Taku Inlet. The Taku Glacier has almost reached the maximum extent it reached in the 1750s during the Little Ice Age (Miller, Miller, and Miller, 1987).

Juneau Icefield has about 40 major and 100 minor glaciers (Miller, Miller, and Miller, 1987). In the view of the Juneau Icefield at the top of this page "note that the Mendenhall glacier feeds from the flat area at the extreme right of the panorama" (Sirk 1997, pers. comm.). The most accessible of the many glaciers originating on Juneau Icefield is the Mendenhall Glacier, which is only 13 miles from Juneau and can be reached by road. My son and I had the good fortune to helicopter over and land on the Mendenhall Glacier and it is this glacier that I will describe.