Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
“You wake up in the morning and you go to your computer to work … and you look outside and it’s raining ashes,” said the former Global Institute for Water Security (GIWS) researcher at the University of Saskatchewan (USask). Aubry-Wake’s research article “Fire and Ice: The Impact of Wildfire-Affected Albedo and Irradiance on Glacier Melt” was published in the American Geophysical Union (AGU) journal Earth’s Future in April 2022.
The United Nations General Assembly has adopted a resolution to declare 2025 the International Year of Glaciers' Preservation — a concept Coldwater Lab director John Pomeroy says is rooted close to home in Canmore, Alta. The declaration is something researchers in Canada hope will help wake up the world that it needs to change course. More than symbolic, it's a year when scientists will release findings and share climate models and projections linked to the disappearance of glaciers, and conferences will raise the profile of this issue.
