Portage Glacier

The Portage Glacier is a glacier in the Chugach Mountains on the Kenai Peninsula in the U.S. state of Alaska. Located just south of Portage Lake, in which he leads, and six kilometers west of Whittier.

The Portage Glacier today has a length of about ten kilometers. During the last 100 years, he has retreated by 5 km. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the face of the glacier tongue was at the west end of Portage Lake. The highest withdrawal rate of 140 to 160 meters per year took place 1939-1950, when the glacier terminus of solid ground shifted into the lake and the glacier lost a lot of its mass by calving. Since 1999, when the glacier terminus at the eastern end of the lake again reached solid ground, the withdrawal rate has slowed significantly and only based on the global warming caused by the ablation.

The name of the glacier, which has its origins in the " Portage" between Prince William Sound and Turnagain Arm, was first mentioned in 1898 by Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, a meteorologist and physicist from the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.