Potential consequences due to the melting Athabasca glacier, Canada
The Athabasca glacier is our source of water and it is being reduced significantly because of climate change. We need to understand what is the data showing from the increases in temperature due to climate change, will the melting glacier increase more water loading in the Athabasca River, will that cause more flooding and at what point will we have no more glacier? What are the future predictions for the glacier as our source water? This information we will enable us to make a decision on whether we need to relocate or not. On the Peace River side, there are three hydroelectric projects, and we are talking to the companies to see if they can release water in the delta. But we need data to understand how much water they can release in the delta without causing flooding in the other areas. For example, how much water need released and in which season in order to have a healthy ecosystem downstream. Another set of data that will be useful is about landform stability. For example, tailings ponds are built to international dam standards, so if there are landform changes there could be consequences of tailings breach where the tailings will basically give out the dam will fail. We need digital topography modelling to understand what will happen in cases where tailing breach and how catastrophic that event will be.