He’s Watching This Glacier Melt Before His Eyes | Short Film Showcase

For [Music] [Music], my name is Rick Brown. I'm the owner of Venture 60 North Adventure Center in Seward, Alaska. I've been guiding here since the early 90s. I've lived here permanently since 2003 and have been guiding in the glaciers all that time.

Normally, I think the park will tell you that it retreats about 150 ft per year. Right now, they're looking at 10 to 15 ft per day. They're seeing the big crevasses that used to be blue up on top of the compression zones now down in the TOA Glacier just falling over. Something that normally would take hundreds of years, we're seeing probably in a matter of a year or two.

We're just watching the transformation happen in front of our eyes. Right now, as you drive into our park, you'll see the signs that mark different points where the glacier had traveled during the 1800s all the way back to the early 1900s. Things that used to take hundreds of years are actually now only taking [Music] months.

We're seeing a change in the wildlife. We have villages that are being relocated. We have storms up here that if they were happening down in the lower 48, we'd name them something. Our 10-e floods are happening every other year now. You can drive to our town and look at what's going on, and if you can't see what's happening, then I think that you must be [Music] blind.

Normally, we're running a snowcat out here. Normally, I would need a plow here at my office, and we need a [Music] lawnmower. I hope that the people that come to Alaska to visit us take time to try to understand what it is they're seeing. This place will not stay the same; it's going to be different. But I just hope that we learn how to take care of [Music] it.

You know, I have four daughters and a bunch of grandkids. As I sit here and talk about this, I wonder what they will see if they come back after I'm gone. That's my concern, is for the future, wondering how this climate thing is going to work out for them. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]