The retreat of the Bering glacier, which has been ongoing since 1900, has the side effect of increasing the number of earthquakes in the area. Just a year ago, there was a flurry of news accounts about the retreat of the Bering Glacier, the largest in Alaska and probably the largest temperate glacier in the world. Glacier Advance and Retreat. The Bering Glacier is the nation’s largest. Glaciers advance and retreat. The following images of the Bering Glacier were taken in October 1986 and September 2002. The Malaspina Glacier, the largest piedmont glacier in North America, is larger than Rhode Island. (Yereth Rosen) Plant Succession Following Surge and Retreat Events of the Bering Glacier, Alaska Tracy H. Allen, PhD, Associate Professor of Geography and the Environmental Sciences Program 1993, 1965, 1922 surge surfaces with contemporary flora Introduction This research documents the succession of plant communities from ice and rock strewn barren ground along If more snow and ice are added than are lost through melting, calving, or evaporation, glaciers will advance. A sign illustrates the retreat of Exit Glacier in Southcentral Alaska. Time-lapse of Bering glacier from 1972-2019, using Landsat imagery. But even before reaching the annual maximum, unusual conditions were setting the stage throughout winter 2017 to 2018.The annual freeze-up started late, and some areas saw little to no shore-fast ice . The retreat of the glacier has resulted in the expansion of a lake at the terminus of the glacier. This reduced weight means that the tectonic plates below are free to move with ease, resulting in an increased occurrence of earthquakes. This frees the plates up to move against each other and cause the friction needed to make earthquakes. Fluctuations of the piedmont lobe of Bering Glacier and its sublobe Steller Glacier over the past two millennia are reconstructed using 34 radiocarbon dates and tree-ring data from 16 sites across the glaciers' forelands. Download Photo by James Roush. Much of Berg Lake drained away when an arm of the Bering Glacier… Scientist measures the movement of the Bering Glacier in Alaska. As the Bering Glacier continues to retreat and thin out, it loses a great deal of its mass. If less snow and ice are added than are lost, glaciers will retreat. "We have predicted that within the next 50 years, the glacier could retreat as much as an additional 30 miles." The dip in Bering Sea ice played a role in the near-record low maximum extent across the entire Arctic in 2018. Fresh water from southern Alaska glaciers that are melting faster is flowing from the Gulf of Alaska into the Bering sea, where it is changing salinity levels. That's because as glaciers melt, they retreat and lighten the load on massive rocky slabs of Earth's crust called tectonic plates.