I admit it. I cheered delightedly along with other passengers lining the decks of Holland America's cruise ship Veendam as, with a thunderous ear-jarring crack, a skyscraper-sized chunk of brilliantly blue ice snapped off the Johns Hopkins Glacier's towering face.
In seconds, the soaring frozen tower that had reminded me of Superman's Fortress of Solitude, complete with a window-like arch lit by a shaft of sunlight, shattered into a slush of ice chunks floating in the bay.
On one hand, I was saddened to see such a magnificent piece of ancient ice vanish; but on the other hand, it was reassuring that the vast glacier appeared pristine, the mountains were covered in snow and I was breathing air that gave a whole new meaning to fresh.
It had been eight years since I'd last done an Alaska cruise, and I was primed to expect that somehow things would have changed – for the worse. Environmentalists keep warning that global warming will mean a baked Alaska. T-shirts in souvenir shops read “Alaska, see it before it melts.” At the same time, the push was on – championed by then-Alaska governor Sarah Palin – for drilling for oil and building roads along the untamed coast.
And then there was the mini-rush to Alaska of cruise tourists lured by fares that have been reaching unprecedented lows. Competition has led to prices as much as 40 per cent lower than last year, and many passengers on the Veendam's seven-day trip northbound from Vancouver to Anchorage opted to stay on for another week because the fare, starting at $470 a person, was as cheap as the cost of a one-way air ticket back to B.C.
But I needn't have worried that our presence might be unwittingly hastening the demise of the very things we had come to admire, says Fay Schaller, an officer with the U.S. National Park Service who boarded the ship in Glacier Bay, south of Anchorage, to make sure our visit complied with environmental protection standards.
On the global-warming front, average temperatures have been increasing by a fraction of a degree each year, leading to more summer melting of snow on mountainsides.
That warming has had devastating consequences for Canada's High Arctic, where summer heat has caused the polar ice cap to retreat at a record rate, according to a report this week.
But the higher temperatures are having a different effect in Alaska, where – because it is warmed by ocean currents –average highs range from about 16 to 25 C in the summer. The heat is bringing more rain and snowfall throughout the year to the state – and that, Schaller explains, means more ice is forming than is melting from the big, sea-level glaciers we are sailing past.
A stringent set of state and federal environmental regulations, and limits set on the number of ships that can visit natural areas on any given day, mean that “we don't see there is any direct environmental impact from tourism,” Schaller says.
By promising to exceed the green standards, Holland America has arranged a long-term deal with the Park Service to have priority to cruise in spectacular Glacier Bay, where only two cruise ships a day are permitted to visit.
The Veendam is fresh from a $40-million renovation that freshened interiors and added a stunning lido deck and new restaurants. But the most important changes are behind the scenes, making the ship dramatically more eco-friendly.
In the bowels of the ship, the engines are burning low-sulphur fuel that costs about three times as much as standard ship diesel.
Before any wastewater is discharged into the ocean, it's filtered, purified in stills and disinfected with ultraviolet light to meet purity standards that are more stringent than most cities have for drinking water.
