Glacial Growth

I hope Rae Ann won't mind if I take a question she asked in a comment as the topic for a post.

The question was:
...why is the glacier on Mt. St. Helens growing while others are shrinking?

I thought I might know the answer, but I wasn't sure, so I thought I had better check. It turns out that my idea was a part (the minor part) of the answer, but not the main idea.

My thought was that, hey, it's a baby. It's only been there since 1980 (its predecessor having been melted and vaporized in the 1980 explosion), and it does get like 40 feet of snowfall every year. Well, it is a young glacier, but it's already bigger than the pre-explosion glacier. It's the fastest growing glacier in the world because the rim of the crater formed by the explosion gives it quite a bit of shade for most of the day. It's expected to keep growing until it gets out of the shade or another meltdown happens.

Details and discussion can be found here

It's one of only two in the US that is growing. Nobody seems to know for sure why the Mount Shasta glacier is growing while those all around it are melting, but it may be getting more snowfall.

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