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Suicide Basin is a partly glacierized marginal basin of Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska, that has released glacier lake outburst floods (GLOFs) annually since 2011. The floods cause inundation and erosion in the Mendenhall Valley, impacting homes and other infrastructure. Here, we utilize in-situ and remote sensing data to assess the recent evolution and current state of Suicide Basin. We focus on the 2018 and 2019 melt seasons, during which we collected most of our data, partly using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). To provide longer-term context, we analyze DEMs collected since 2006 and model glacier surface mass balance over the 2006–2019 period. During the 2018 and 2019 outburst flood events, Suicide Basin released...
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Snow is a major, climate-sensitive feature of the Earth’s surface and catalyst of fundamentally important ecosystem processes. Understanding how snow influences sentinel species in rapidly changing mountain ecosystems is particularly critical. Whereas effects of snow on food availability, energy expenditure, and predation are well documented, we report how avalanches exert major impacts on an ecologically significant mountain ungulate - the coastal Alaskan mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus). Using long-term GPS data and field observations across four populations (421 individuals over 17 years), we show that avalanches caused 23−65% of all mortality, depending on area. Deaths varied seasonally and were directly...
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