In the course of her job as a journalist, Naomi Klouda stashed notes on Alaska glaciers in a big folder. Over time, they took on a life of their own. The Homer writer says it was a slow and persistent process. Then, much in the way that glaciers can suddenly surge and leap forward, “The Alaska Glacier Dictionary” was born.
“Glaciers are alive. They’re not static,” Klouda said. “If they were, they wouldn’t be a glacier.”
Klouda says her book, published this year by Cardamon Press, is for travelers and armchair adventurers alike, to give them quick access to a glacier’s vital stats. But it’s more than a reference book.“Every glacier has a story, and no two are alike,” Klouda said. “They are very individual.”
While glaciers tantalize tourists with their beautiful blue ice, they tend to recede into the backdrop of everyday life for Alaskans. Klouda says people in Anchorage forget that when they turn on the tap, they’re drinking glacial meltwater from Eklutna Lake. Or when they eat giant vegetables from the Matanuska Susitna Valley, they get their flavor from the rich, glacial silt.
Despite glaciers’ importance to Alaska, Klouda discovered while she was writing the book that she was breaking new trail.
“There's no one compilation that gives you all of the information that this glacier dictionary does, and so it's sort of a baseline,” she said.
She says the research wasn’t easy because the data was scattered across different maps, studies and agencies.
“You're finding information that is outdated by ten years already,” she said. “Maybe that was the last time that that particular glacier was measured.”
Rick Thoman, one of Alaska’s foremost experts on climate change, says the book will help identify glaciers that need more research, especially those that have changed a lot.
“This is the kind of compilation that its value will grow in the coming decades, when some of this information will be even harder to acquire,” Thoman said, “and some of those glaciers will be no more.”
At least one glacier has disappeared since Klouda started work on her book, Antler Glacier, 32 miles from Juneau. It was named in 1960 and considered extinct in 2024.
Glaciers’ original names tell of Alaska’s past
Thoman, who is based at the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment in Fairbanks, says scientists must look to Indigenous peoples for clues to a glacier’s past. He says it’s important that Klouda has included the original names in her book.
“Here in the Interior, there are names that sure sound like they refer to times when the glaciers were much more advanced,” Thoman said.
“It was really important to me to get the Indigenous names, wherever I could find them,” Klouda said. “There are some really beautiful designations on glaciers. Like, they’ll be very descriptive.”
One of her favorites is the Dena’ina name for a glacier on Mt. Spurr. K’idazq’eni, pronounced key-dawz-kuh-nee, means “one that is burning inside.”
On the Kenai Peninsula there’s a glacier called Nuka, a word with roots in both the Inupiaq and Supiaq languages.
“The word Nuka is derived from nukaq,” Klouda said, “which refers to a young bull caribou.”
She says caribou are not found on the glacier itself but in the surrounding area, so the name might tell us the glacier was a landmark for hunters in search of a herd.
Sometimes glaciers forced even people to migrate, like in Glacier Bay in Southeast Alaska.
“There's stories of glaciers, just all of a sudden breaking or lurching forward or advancing, and then covering up a salmon stream temporarily. So, there goes the salmon run,” Klouda said. “All of these different interactions that were very important.”
The names also tell Alaska’s story of colonialism
Klouda says Alaska glaciers also tell the story of colonialism. Most were named after explorers, politicians or other well-known figures of the day – often people who had never set foot in Alaska.
“The Harriman expedition named a lot of glaciers, and they were totally colonial white guys coming north, naming glaciers,” Klouda said. “We've got Wesleyan, Yale, Smith, Brown, Harvard, Columbia.”
When geologists from the U.S. Geological Survey mapped and named glaciers, they often supplanted Indigenous names. Other times, they failed to acknowledge the contributions of Alaska Natives – like the Athabascan hunting party led by Chief Sesui, who came to the rescue of some starving, half-frozen explorers after a bear raided their cache in 1899.
“They found a bear, took it and then found bacon inside the bear,” Klouda said. “and thought, ‘Well, that's weird. Why would there be bacon inside this bear?’”
Bacon is a food Alaska Natives associated with white people, which alerted the chief to their presence.
The bear was killed in what is now Denali National Park.
After taking it, Chief Sesui followed its tracks and found the men, who were lost and on the verge of starvation. He took them to his village, fed and clothed them for several months and, when the weather improved, guided them to the Yukon.
But when it came to naming a glacier on the North side of Mt. Foraker, it was the Army lieutenant who led the expedition, Joseph Herron, who was remembered with the name Herron Glacier, not Chief Sesui.
In the coming decades, Alaska Natives would get credit for their exploits. Harper Glacier was named for Walter Harper, a Koyukon Athabascan mountaineer, who was the first person to summit Denali at the age of 21.
“You're thinking that you're writing about glaciers, but you're actually writing about people,” Klouda said.
That’s why Klouda says a glacier’s name is literally the tip of the iceberg. She says Alaska has about 100,000 glaciers but only 700 made it into her dictionary, where they are listed in alphabetical order. Her book also includes essays from other writers and a compilation of scientific factoids and glacier terminology — and it’s small enough to carry in a backpack.
