Olympic National Park has hundreds of glaciers, but a “burst” like that which triggered an alert below Mount Rainier late Tuesday night would be less dramatic, a park spokeswoman says.
“It would be the same sort of thing, but these are much smaller glaciers (in the Olympics), so it wouldn’t be the same magnitude,” Barb Maynes, the spokeswoman, said.
Maynes noted that Mount Rainier has some significant differences from Mount Olympus.
Chief among them is height — a difference of 6,000 feet.
Another is that Rainier is a dormant volcano; Olympus and its neighboring peaks are not.
So could the Olympics’ glaciers “burst” into rivers that drain the Peninsula’s mountain range?
“Three things are at work,” she said.
“Mount Rainier is more than 14,000 feet. The tallest mountain here is Mount Olympus at almost 8,000 feet. So there is a big difference in the amount of ice and snowfall.
“Second, Mount Rainier stands alone and it is a volcano, which adds to the risk. That is not applicable here.
“Third, there’s the nature of the rivers and their proximity to major population centers.”
Blue Glacier is the largest of the Olympics’ 266 glaciers, only 60 of which are named. It is 2.75 miles long at 4,049 feet in elevation, and its toe is at the headwaters of the Hoh River.
Nine other large alpine glaciers descend from the Olympics’ upper snow slopes into the headwater valleys of the Hoh and Queets rivers.
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