hen Cliff Goodwin first came to Franz Josef he didn’t know what a glacier was. It was 2001, and Goodwin had been travelling down the length of New Zealand from his hometown Taranaki, doing odd jobs: fruit picking, housekeeping. “I worked until I had $1,000, then I travelled until I had $100,” he says. Goodwin had been intending to top up his bank account, then go. But soon after arriving in Franz Josef – on the West Coast of the South Island, at the foot of the Southern Alps – he went to see the town’s biggest draw for himself. A short drive into the valley, Goodwin was confronted by the bright white face of the glacier: a thick seam of ice churning its way down from the mountains and into the stony riverbed below. The sight of snow was almost startling, so close to the ocean – the glacier terminates only 20km from the Tasman Sea – and so close up. But Goodwin was not content just to look. “I did what most young boys did: jumped over the barriers, went and walked on the ice, and had a great old time,” he says. “It was awesome. I didn’t have any shoes on, either.” Soon afterwards, Goodwin got a job as a glacier guide – and one season turned into many. Now he and his wife Tash run their own company, taking nature walking tours through the glacier valley. What drew Goodwin in was the local history – stories of the glacier’s storming advances, sometimes so fast that snow would swallow shoes left at its base within a day; and the subsequent periods of retreat, revealing gear and paths from the past. On the computer in his office, Goodwin has collected thousands of photos of the glacier, dating back to the late 19th century and its early days as a tourist destination. “I fell in love with the glacier a long time ago – I think just because it’s moving, it’s living, it’s changing,” he says. “You can try and understand it, predict it, know what it’s going to do next.” By nature, glaciers go through phases of advance and retreat. But lately these immense bodies of ice – so vast and ancient as to have carved the surface of the Earth – have been losing ground in a warming world. Over 40 years, annual aerial surveys of the Southern Alps have shown the altitude at which snow persists throughout the year is climbing higher, and the overall volume of ice reducing – with flow-on effects for the glaciers. Analysis by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) revealed that from 1977 to 2014, a third of the permanent snow and ice was lost from the Southern Alps – a dramatic decline that began accelerating rapidly in the last 15 years. More recent surveys have been even more sobering. The summer of 2017-2018 – which saw January temperatures of nearly 3C warmer than average – was the worst on record, scientists said. Some glaciers had shrunk so much, they were hard to see; many would be gone within decades. A new analysis of more than 200,000 global glaciers found that those in New Zealand showed record thinning of 1.5m a year from 2015-2019 – a nearly sevenfold increase compared to 2000-2004. The outlook is similarly grim for glaciers the world over, with human-induced climate warming the chief factor in their decline. What distinguishes those in New Zealand is the monitoring of their retreat – and the fact you do not need to be a scientist in a plane to see it. Compared with the 198,000 glaciers globally, the 3,000 in Aotearoa are relatively easy to access. Most are in the Southern Alps, a 450km mountain range running down the spine of the South Island, within five hours’ drive of Christchurch and Queenstown. Just a 30-minute drive separates Franz Josef and Fox and their namesake glaciers, among the largest in New Zealand. For much of their history, people have been able to walk right up to the terminus, to see for themselves the snow as a shifting mass – a river only just made solid. Growing up in Hokitika, Brian Anderson was taken onto the top of Franz Josef glacier on a school trip around 1993. At that time the ice was advancing, covering paths just about as fast as the guides could cut them in. Even now, Anderson remembers it with awe. “You could see that it was moving, it was flowing – but at the same time it was solid,” he says by phone from his home further north on the west coast. “That contradiction really grabbed me … I wanted to understand how that thing worked, and what it was telling us.” Today Anderson is an associate professor at the Antarctic Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in using mathematical modelling to show how glaciers have moved through history – and project where they might go. With glaciers well-known indicators of climate change, it is Anderson’s hope that understanding their anthropogenic and natural drivers may help us to navigate and even anticipate the coming crisis. But compared with continental glaciers, New Zealand’s marine glaciers pose a particular challenge to study because of the variable climate, influencing atmospheric and oceanic conditions and, with them, glacier mass. This can make measuring the extent of anthropogenic change difficult. Franz Josef and Fox glaciers in particular are unusual for the speed with which they respond to their conditions, a feature of their maritime climate and especially steep inclines. Very few glaciers on Earth react as swiftly, says Anderson: “The difference from one year to the next can be really extreme.” Both glaciers, along with dozens of others in New Zealand, advanced nearly continuously from 1983 to 2008 due to several periods of cooler-than-average temperatures. But over the past 20 years, the trend has been one of decline. Any visitor returning to Franz Josef glacier this year, after 10 years, would notice a stark distance. Since 2008, it has been retreating rapidly and lost a massive 1.56km in length, at the fastest rate ever recorded. Fox has gone a similar way, losing 900m in the decade to 2018. To Anderson, the dramatic changes seen at these two glaciers herald more to come. He projects that future advances will be unlikely to make up for lost ground, while retreats will be more aggressive. Even if warming temperatures do not exceed 2C, glaciers will continue shrinking – just at a slower rate. “The Southern Alps will still have glaciers in them,” says Anderson. But on the current, high-carbon path, “all that will be left by 2100 will be small ice patches, hidden away deep in the mountains.” The ramifications are significant. Glaciers are an important store of fresh water, their seasonal melt into rivers supporting irrigation of farmland and hydropower schemes, and acting as a buffer against drought. The disappearing ice also contributes to rising sea levels: a serious risk to low-lying settlements such as in the Pacific Islands, the city of Christchurch and even Franz Josef itself. The Waiho River that flows from the glacier is building at a rate of about 30cm a year, and is awaiting $24m of reinforcement work. But Franz and Fox, as glacier towns, already stand to lose more than many confronting the climate crisis – and sooner. For over a century, both have relied on their so-called “accessible glaciers” to attract people and business. The spectacular landscape led the West Coast to emerge as one of New Zealand’s first tourist destinations, from the late 19th century. Retired guide Hakaraia “Huck” Tinirau, 83, remembers guests at the Glacier Hotel – established by the Graham brothers, pioneers in the area – being taken up to the ice in the late 1950s. “They had to ride up on horseback, because there wasn’t a road.” As a new arrival to Franz from Whanganui, Tinirau had worked on the first winding gravel route over the hill to the neighbouring township Fox – joining up the West Coast with the rest of the South Island. Now about 500,000 international tourists come to the Westland District every year, and Franz’s resident population of about 400 swells to more than 1,000 with the arrival of seasonal workers ahead of the high season. “It’s chocka,” says Tinirau’s wife, Sandra. She set up their home as an B&B after her motelier friends consistently saw more demand than they had beds. A recent report by Development West Coast (DWC) and the industry body Glacier Country Tourism Group put the economic impact of tourism to the glaciers at $120m per year. But as they retreat, they may be both less of a draw and, with more extreme weather events, harder to reach – posing a threat to the livelihoods and communities that depend on them. In Franz Josef alone, 90% of residents work in tourism. As their prized asset melts away, they have already been forced to adapt. Marius Bron has been guiding on Fox glacier for 22 years, sometimes taking two trips a day. In that time, he says, change has been the only constant. “It’s like a battle, every day,” he says, sitting outside the office of Fox Glacier Guiding, where he is operations manager. Between road closures, falling rocks and flooded rivers, “I’ve had two decades of event after event – just to get into the valley.” The access road to Fox glacier has been closed since March 2019, following repeated flooding and a massive landslide. A report commissioned by the Department of Conservation (DOC) and the New Zealand Transport Agency found that a $16m repair would likely not last. Since then, the only way of getting on to the glacier has been by helicopter. That has been the case at Franz Josef glacier since 2012, when it was deemed no longer safe to allow people to access from the valley on foot – concluding a century of guided walks directly on to the glacier. At the time, says Jon Tyler of Franz Josef Glacier Guides, it was thought to spell the end of glacier tourism. Instead, the industry made a massive change to its offering, bringing in helicopters to fly people over the unstable lower glacier, on to the hard ice higher up – replacing a 40-minute hike with a six-minute flight. Pre-Covid, some 30,000 helicopter landings were made in the Westland Tai Poutini national park (where both glaciers are situated) each year – even excluding the scenic flights that never touch down. Ironically, as glaciers worldwide retreat, glacier tourism is increasing. “It’s almost like they’re coming to see it before, in the future, you maybe won’t be able to,” says Craig Buckland, Tyler’s colleague. Increasingly, Tyler adds, people want to learn about climate change, and see its impacts for themselves. But the retreat is hard to notice from the upper glacier, amid about 30 sq km of snow, says Buckland. The most obvious challenge is the increasing amount of exposed rock, which gets heated by the sun and speeds up the melt. “It just gets worse and worse and worse,” he grimaces. But for the moment, the bigger challenge is Covid-19. New Zealand’s borders have been closed for a year, decimating tourism to the West Coast. Pre-pandemic, Fox Glacier Guiding was taking up to 300 heli-hikers onto the ice every day of the high season, conditions permitting. Today it has had four – plus a cancellation for next week, forced by a localised lockdown in Auckland. The business has gone from 40 guides to five. “The key for us is just to keep going,” Bron says. It is the same story in Franz, with turnover down by 80-90%. “We’re just taking it month by month,” says Lily Cooney-Wilson, 26, on another slow afternoon at the Inflite skydiving customer service desk. From three groups of 10 people each day, Goodwin’s Glacier Valley Eco Tours has gone to two bookings a week, or longer. He and his wife have now reduced their operation to ensure it exists when tourists, one day, return. “It’s one big blow right now – the whole town’s suffering,” Goodwin says. “…Now we need to try and focus on what makes money, and get rid of anything that doesn’t.” For some businesses that has not been enough. The DWC report, based on Treasury forecasts and local surveys, found that 16% of businesses in the area have closed, and 62% of jobs lost. Hundreds of people have already left town to find work elsewhere, putting pressure on the local fire brigade, ambulance and other vital volunteer-run services. For now, Covid is a greater threat to glacier tourism than the changing climate. But if their businesses survive the pandemic, the guides seem relatively optimistic about the industry’s ability to adapt. “As a guide, it’s almost something you do every day,” says Buckland. Even taking into account projections of climbing snow lines, “it doesn’t mean that the view’s not going to be there, and the experience can’t be there,” says Tyler. “It just needs to change.” For Wayne Costello, chasing the retreating ice does not go far enough. “Glacier visits are going to get harder. We’ve been saying this for 10 years: ‘You need to think of a different approach.’” As South Westland District operations manager for DOC, Costello has the challenging job of balancing tourism with conservation. For too long, he says, too many local businesses have been able to coast by on the pull of the glaciers, providing only for people passing through. The “fraught” strategy was reflected in the tourists who came to the area, says Costello, many of whom would stop at the glaciers then go – sometimes not even spending a night. Meanwhile, their constant helicopter trips had led to complaints of noise pollution – not to mention senseless greenhouse gas emissions to land on a vanishing landmark. “The resilience around the offering is not there: as communities and businesses, we needed to get our head around that much sooner,” Costello says. But though the long-term risks were well known, there was little incentive or opportunity to change: “The glacier was still here, people were still coming, money was still rolling in.” As punishing as the past year has been, the pause in tourism has forced those living in glacier towns to imagine a future without it – and highlighted the risk in doubling down on disappearing ice. “A lot of people are now seeing that we need to have more strings to our bow,” says Costello. The goal, he believes, should be to make the West Coast “a destination in its own right”, emphasising the opportunities for mountain biking, hiking, surfing, kayaking and bird watching to encourage visitors to stay longer and see more. Some of that work is already under way through the government’s $1.1bn Jobs for Nature pandemic relief package, supporting local businesses to retain staff through projects to enhance the area. Now many guides (including both Goodwin and his wife) have been hired to trap pests, help with threatened species, clear walking tracks and even create new ones. The scheme has helped to align conservation and tourism interests in the region to reduce its reliance on the glaciers and “build that sustainability and resilience into the future”, says Costello. “We’re much more connected as a community now, and I think that’s a huge benefit for us going forward – if we can retain it.” New Zealand’s glacier towns may be able to change course; for the glaciers, however, it is likely too late. Though the latest aerial survey of the Southern Alps, carried out in March, was not quite as desperate as in the recent past, a return to average is not enough to reverse years of retreat. Even curbing greenhouse gas emissions has been found to have only very limited influence on glacier mass for the rest of this century. But if there are to be glaciers anywhere on Earth, into the next century – ambitious cuts are essential. The same goes for eluding the worst of the climate crisis, says glaciologist Brian Anderson. “It is a really stark choice that we have … Glaciers are by no means the most important in terms of what is going to happen to people or ecosystems, but they show really clearly what our options are.” Given the stakes, says Anderson, it is “almost a bit of an indulgence” to dwell on disappearing ice. For Goodwin, the guide who fell in love with the glacier, its decline is the most recent chapter in a story characterised by change. “But it’s also quite concerning to think about what that actually means,” he says. “It’s not so much tourism – it’s what happens to everything else.” Standing on the side of the road that runs through Franz Josef, Goodwin points up towards the Southern Alps. Peaks that were snow-capped through summer when he first came to town are now ragged with rock, he says. “I look up at those mountains every day, and I feel sad.”