Mark Meier, wearing a national Georgian cap at the Grossaletschgletscher, Switzerland, in 1978, following a conference in Tbilisi. Photo by Vladimir Kotlyakov.

In 1981 I was a new graduate student at the University of Washington (UW), recently arrived from New Hampshire to study Alaskan glaciers with Charlie Raymond. Every October a group of glaciologists from various western institutions ranging from the University of Alaska to Caltech in Pasadena would meet at a determinedly informal gathering called “Northwest Glaciologists.” The venue rotated among the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver, the UW campus in Seattle, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Project Office—Glaciology, tucked into the 8th floor of an office building in Tacoma, Washington, with a commanding view of Mt. Rainier. One rainy Thursday in October of that year, I drove down to Tacoma with Charlie and the other graduate students in my group, to attend my first Northwest Glaciologist's meeting, and to meet a fabled figure, Mark Meier.

The USGS Tacoma office comprised about 12 people in those days, and was at the very center of U.S. glaciological research, operating not only the best and longest glacier mass balance program in North America, but also the long-term study of the retreat of Columbia Glacier, pioneering research and development in ice-penetrating radar, and the earliest applications of satellite remote sensing to snow and ice. Mark was unquestionably the leader of this group, not only in his official capacity as project chief but also as guiding spirit: the magnetic center of ideas, direction, and energy.

When we arrived at the Tacoma office on that rainy Thursday, I lingered in the corridors, looking at posters, photographs, and eyeing the names on office doors—other names that I knew, along with Mark's, but had yet to put faces to. In the conference room a few minutes later, Mark appeared, gregarious, welcoming, clearly enjoying his role as social host as much as scientific leader. Mark was accessible even to the newest and least experienced of us, organizing the day's schedule with special attention to the students, and attentive to our presentations. His casual, avuncular bearing was disarming, and his tendency to let his colleagues take the spotlight in the day's talks, was also disarming. It was easy, in that time before I knew him well, to suppose that Mark was principally an organizer of people, a host who provided an environment where bright minds could work to best advantage.

That misconception was quickly corrected; by the end of the two-day Northwest Glaciologist's meeting I had a clearer idea of Mark's own powers, and saw that among the bright minds at the project office—and among all of my new west-coast colleagues—Mark was among the very brightest. His contributions, not just in North American glaciology but in the broader international spheres of hydrology and polar science, are of such depth and breadth that it has taken all of the subsequent 30 years I have known and worked with Mark Meier to fully understand their scope.

Glaciology is not an old field in North America, and Mark's career spanned a crucial stage, when the study of glaciers moved from a primarily descriptive field, grounded in geology and geography, to a quantitative, process-oriented discipline, grounded in physics and drawing heavily on mathematics and technology. Also during this period, as snow and ice generally came to be fully recognized as an integral part of global hydrology and water resources, programs such as the International Hydrological Decade were established to organize and maintain knowledge of global water resources, including glaciers and ice sheets. Mark played a role here as central as his part in the focused technical investigation of glaciers.

Mark Meier's preparation for a career in modern quantitative glaciology was prescient: introduced to geology and the mountains by his father, Mark received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in 1949, followed by an MSc degree in geology in 1951, both from the University of Iowa. His 1951 thesis was a study of the structure of the Dinwoody Glacier in the Wind River Mountains. Combining sophisticated continuum mechanics with geologic insight, his thesis work was illuminated by an artistic sensibility in his treatment of maps and figures. Following the completion of his MSc, Mark moved on to Caltech in 1951 to study glaciology with the best authority at the time, R. L. Sharp. In addition to his background in geology and electrical engineering, Mark had picked up valuable skills in electronics while in the Navy, including radar technology. Seismic methods were already in use for determining glacier depths, but depth sounding by the propagation of electromagnetic radiation through ice was in its infancy, and his experience in radar would be a factor in its development. His PhD, completed in 1957, involved another field study, on Saskatchewan Glacier in Canada, where Mark again combined geologic insight, mathematical expertise, and field savvy to produce a highly detailed and complete observational picture of glacier dynamics against which rapidly evolving theory could be tested.

An example of Mark Meier's cartographic expertise, a map of the Wind River Mountains, Wyoming, drawn in 1950.

The USGS Project Office—Glaciology was created in 1956 with Mark as project chief, renewing the USGS's involvement in glaciers, which had been in decline since the death of F. E. Matthes in 1948. Among its first tasks was the selection of a set of glaciers for long-term study—accessible, logistically manageable, but representative of the thousands of glaciers throughout the mountain ranges of western North America, which, unlike the much more compact European Alps, could only be assessed by statistical inference from a very limited set of observations. This work was coordinated with similar programs in other countries through the Permanent Service on the Fluctuation of Glaciers, headquartered in Zurich. Mark led the U.S. portion of this program, participating in fundamental issues of experimental design and strategy from selection of glaciers to definitions of standard concepts and terminology in glacier mass balance. Later, when the World Data Centers for Snow and Ice were formed, the U.S. Data Center (WDC-A Glaciology) was housed at the USGS Tacoma office. (It subsequently was relocated to its current location in Boulder, Colorado.)

Among the glaciers selected for study, the South Cascade glacier in Washington's North Cascade Range, the Blue Glacier in Washington's Olympic Range, the Nisqually Glacier on Mt. Rainier, and Alaska's Columbia Glacier were Mark's favorites. He and the USGS crew oversaw the construction of huts to support research at South Cascade glacier, the site of one of North America's longest glacier mass balance records, and where the world's first radio-echo sounding measurements in temperate ice were conducted; and at Blue Glacier, where Bob Sharp, Mark's PhD advisor at Caltech, had been working since the International Geophysical Year. Sharp, a visionary geoscientist and a seminal figure in North American glaciology, gathered his students at Blue Glacier, and those students gathered their own students, forming a cadre that served as leaders in glaciology for the next half-century: along with Mark Meier, Bob Sharp's glaciological colleagues and descendants also included Ron Shreve, Ed LaChapelle, Barclay Kamb, Charlie Raymond, Sam Colbeck, Bob Bindschadler, Keith Echelemeyer, and Mindy Brugman, among others. Mark Meier's early accomplishments at Blue Glacier were described in a now-classic 1960 Journal of Geology paper on the relationship between the glacier's motion and stresses and the structures observed in the ice.

Columbia Glacier, a complex and fast-moving river of ice extending 70 km from the crest of Alaska's Chugach Mountains to the ocean near Valdez, in Prince William Sound, is perhaps the glacier most strongly associated with Mark Meier and one of his oldest and closest colleagues, Austin Post. Post was one of the most astute and well-traveled glaciologists working in Alaska, and since the 1964 Alaskan earthquake he had been engaged in an investigation searching for evidence of changes in glaciers caused by the earthquake. In the 1960s, the systematic, long-term behavior of ocean-ending, or “tidewater” glaciers was known in general terms: long periods of slow advance punctuated by shorter periods of rapid flow, high rates of iceberg calving, and retreat, with much of that knowledge due to Austin Post's efforts. The detailed processes controlling tidewater glacier behavior, however, were obscure. Alaska has more than 50 such glaciers, but Columbia was of special interest in part because its geometry suggested that retreat might be imminent, and also because of its location near the entrance to Valdez Arm, in the northeast corner of Prince William Sound. Ships carrying crude oil from the planned southern terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline would soon be passing through Valdez Arm, and traversing the waters in front of Columbia's terminus, exposed to icebergs calved from the glacier during the retreat. Mark conceived of a plan to study Columbia Glacier in unprecedented detail, and ultimately to make a forecast, predicting when Columbia Glacier's retreat would start, how long the retreat would last, and how the release of icebergs into the tanker shipping lanes in Prince William Sound might threaten shipping operations and tanker safety. Following long and complex negotiations at USGS Headquarters in Reston, Virginia, Mark's ambitious plan was approved, and by the mid-1970s the Columbia Glacier research program was underway. The prediction, issued in 1979, successfully anticipated the onset of the glacier's accelerating flow, increased iceberg calving rate, and dramatic terminus retreat up the valley once occupied by ice as much as one kilometer in thickness—now a new fjord, 20 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide, still choked by icebergs from the glacier's continued retreat, following a pattern whose essential elements were defined 30 years ago by Mark's USGS Tacoma team.

In 1985, Mark left the USGS to move to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he took the helm of the university's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). Mark's experience and reputation in the international scientific community and his engaging, inclusive management style made him an ideal choice to lead INSTAAR. His record of international science leadership, with a particular focus on global hydrology and cold regions research, were ideal assets for the challenges that accompanied INSTAAR's growth during his years as director, from 1985 to 1994, when the institute grew to more than three times its size in the early 1980s and broadened both its range of research activities and its role in the teaching mission of the university. Mark's accomplishments by this time can be appreciated by even a partial list of the organizations and working groups he had either headed or participated in: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lead author, president of International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS), president of the International Commission on Snow and Ice (ICSI), president and chair of the Board of Directors of the Arctic Research Commission of the United States (ARCUS), a driving force behind the NSF Arctic System Sciences (ARCSS) initiative, and many more. The awards with which he was honored are equally extensive, and show especially the regard his international colleagues had for him: the Seligman Crystal of the International Glaciological Society, three medals from the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and the Robert E. Horton medal, also from the AGU.

Far from moving away from active research and into the role of administrator, Mark accomplished some his most significant and far-reaching scientific contributions while he was serving as director of INSTAAR. These concerned sea level rise and the role of the world's small glaciers (as opposed to the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica) in contributing to sea level rise in a warming climate. Building on a landmark paper he had published in Science in 1984, Mark became the principal authority on global assessments of glacier mass balance, and brought in colleagues such as Mark Dyurgerov and David Bahr to build a team whose expertise and analysis formed the theoretical foundation and knowledge base that forms the core of our knowledge today of the source of a major fraction of present and future sea level rise.

These are the achievements that I have come to appreciate, not only as a student in Seattle but later, when I joined Mark as a Postdoc at INSTAAR and later as a colleague, Fellow of INSTAAR, and faculty member of the University. More than a list of committees and awards, however, Mark's contributions and influence emerged gradually in conversations and while working on joint projects, where the discussion of almost any theory, method, instrument, or glacier would lead eventually to some previous key moment where Mark had been present or in which he had a hand. Mark was, in any case, never one to emphasize the highlights of his CV, and his stature in science had to be teased out, emerging when necessary and not before.

Mark's life was characterized by interactions with others, and one of the most immediately noticeable of his traits was his sociability, his strong tendency to connect with others, that I had seen first at the Northwest Glaciologist's meeting in Tacoma. His fascination with the weaving projects of his artist wife Barbara, his pride in his children, his tangible delight in his grandchildren, were likewise an expression of this same awareness of and attention to others, the same tendency to connect. After retiring as INSTAAR's director, Mark took advantage of the opportunities to spend more time with his family and with his own art as well: painting, drawing, model building, all skills and talents that had been present and active throughout his life—his maps and drawings from his Dinwoody Glacier thesis are wonderful examples—having been nurtured by his own parents, and especially his father, a psychologist with a sophisticated and long-term involvement in art himself.

We have a lot to remember Mark by, more, possibly, than for most people who leave us. Not only do we have his research achievements, documented by a prolific record of publication, and other accomplishments in his various scientific capacities, we also have his paintings, drawings, whimsical cartoons illustrating serious scientific points, and even boat models of fantastic craft that never existed in the world outside of his own active imagination. And finally, we have our memories, not only of a fine and creative scientist, but, for me at least, a welcoming presence, enjoying his role as host and leader, not just to a scientific meeting, but also to a career and lifetime in glaciers.

Following is a sample of the diverse and groundbreaking range of topics represented among more than 100 papers published by Mark F. Meier between 1954 and 2009.

Bahr, D., Dyurgerov, M., and Meier, M. F., 2009: Sea-level rise from glaciers and ice caps: a lower bound. Geophysical Research Letters, 36: L03501, DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2008GL036309.

Meier, M. F., Dyurgerov, M. B., Rick, U. K., O'Neill, S., Pfeffer, W. T., Anderson, R. S., Anderson, S., and Glazovsky, A. F., 2007: Glaciers dominate eustatic sea-level rise in the 21st century. Science, 317: 1064–1067, supporting material online, DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1143906.

Dyurgerov, M., and Meier, M. F., 2005: Glaciers and the study of climate and sea-level change. In Bamber, J. L., and Payne, A. J. (eds.), Mass Balance of the Cryosphere: Observations and Modelling of Contemporary and Future Changes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 579–622.

Meier, M. F., and Wahr, J. M., 2002: Sea level is rising: do we know why? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99(10): 6524–6526. Bahr, D., Pfeffer, W. T., Sassolas, C., and Meier, M. F., 1998: Response time of glaciers as a function of size and mass balance: I. Theory. Journal of Geophysical Research, 103(B5): 9777–9782.

Pfeffer, W. T., Sassolas, C., Bahr, D., and Meier, M. F., 1998: Response time of glaciers as a function of size and mass balance: II. Numerical experiments. Journal of Geophysical Research, 103(B5): 9783–9789.

Bahr, D., Meier, M. F., and Peckham, S. D., 1997: The physical basis of glacier volume-area scaling. Journal of Geophysical Research, 102(B9): 20,355–20,362,  http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~funk/Projektarbeit2012/daten/litteratur/bahr19971.pdf.

Meier, M. F., and Bahr, D., 1996: Counting glaciers: use of scaling methods to estimate the number and size distribution of the glaciers of the world. In Colbeck, S. C. (ed.), Glaciers, Ice Sheets and Volcanoes: a Tribute to Mark F. Meier. Hanover, New Hampshire: Cold Regions Research Engineering Laboratory Special Report 96–27: 89–94,  http://www.stormingmedia.us/24/2431/A243123.html.

Meier, M. F., Lundstrom, S., Stone, D., Kamb, B., Engelhardt, H., Humphrey, N., Dunlap, W., Fahnestock, M., Krimmel, R., and Walters, R., 1994: Mechanical and hydrologic basis for the rapid motion of a large tidewater glacier, 1. Observations. Journal of Geophysical Research, 99(B8): 15,219–15,229, DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/94JB00237.

Bahr, D., Pfeffer, W. T., and Meier, M. F., 1994: Theoretical limitations to englacial velocity calculations. Journal of Glaciology, 40(136): 509–518.

Trupin, A. S., Meier, M. F., and Wahr, J. M., 1992: Effect of melting glaciers on the Earth's rotation and gravitational field: 1965–1984. Geophysical Journal International, 108(1): 1–15, DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-246X.1992.tb00835.x.

McCauley, L. L., and Meier, M. F., 1991 : Arctic System Science Land/ Atmosphere/Ice Interactions, A Plan for Action. Boulder, Colorado: Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. Workshop, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Boulder, CO, 26 February—3 March, 1990, 48 pp.

Pfeffer, W. T., and Meier, M. F., 1991: Retention of Greenland runoff by refreezing: implications for projected future sea level change. Journal of Geophysical Research, 96(C12): 22,117–22,124,  http://www.ualberta.ca/~eec/Pfeffer1991.pdf.

Meier, M. F., 1990: Reduced rise in sea level. Nature, 343: 115–116. DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/343115a0.

Meier, M. F., and Post, A., 1987: Fast tidewater glaciers. Journal of Geophysical Research, 92(B9): 9051–9058, DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/JB092iB09p09051.

Meier, M. F., Rasmussen, L. A., and Miller, D. S., 1985: Columbia Glacier in 1984: disintegration underway. U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 85–81, 21 pp.

Meier, M. F., 1984: Contribution of small glaciers to global sea level. Science, 226(4681): 1418–1421, DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.226.4681.1418.

Brown, C. S., Meier, M. F., Post, A., 1982: Calving speed of Alaska tidewater glaciers, with application to Columbia Glacier. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1258-C.

Meier, M. F., 1980: Predicted timing of the disintegration of the lower reach of Columbia Glacier, Alaska. U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 80–582.

Meier, M. F., 1980: Remote sensing of snow and ice. Hydrological Sciences Bulletin, 25(3): 307–330.

Meier, M. F., Post, A., Rasmussen, L. A., Sikonia, W. G., and Mayo. L. R., 1980: Retreat of Columbia Glacier: a preliminary prediction. U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 80–10.

Post, A., and Meier, M. F., 1980: A preliminary inventory of Alaskan glaciers. IAHS-AISH Publication 126: 45–46.

Frank, D., Meier, M. F., and Swanson, D. A., 1977: Assessment of increased thermal activity at Mount Baker, Washington, March 1975—March 1976. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1022-A.

Krimmel, R. M.. and Meier, M. F., 1976: Surging and nonsurging glaciers in the Pamir Mountains, U.S.S.R. In ERTS-1, a new window on our planet. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 929: 173–175.

Krimmel, R. M., and Meier, M. F., 1975: Glacier applications of ERTS images. Journal of Glaciology, 15(73): 391–402.

Watts, R. D., England, A. W., Vickers, R. S., and Meier, M. F., 1975: Radio-echo sounding on South Cascade Glacier, Washington, using a long-wavelength, mono-pulse source. Journal of Glaciology, 15(73): 459–461.

Meier, M. F., Tangborn, W. V., Mayo, L. R., and Post, A., 1971: Combined ice and water balances of Gulkana and Wolverine Glaciers, Alaska, and South Cascade Glacier, Washington, 1965 and 1966 hydrologic years. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 715A.

Meier, M. F., 1970: Snow and ice sensing with passive microwave and ground truth instrumentation; recent results, South Cascade Glacier. In 2nd Annual Earth Resources Aircraft Program. Houston: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Manned Spacecraft Center.

Meier, M. F., and Post, A., 1969: What are glacier surges? Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 6(4): 807–817, DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1139/e69-081.

Nye, J., Weertman, J., Lliboutr., L., Meier, M. F., Rothlisb., H., and Weeks, W. F., 1969: Discussion of Water lubrication mechanism of glacier surges. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 6(4): 939 + .

Allen, C. R., Kamb, W. B., Meier, M. F., and Sharp, R. P., 1960: Structure of the Lower Blue Glacier, Washington. Journal of Geology, 68(6): 601+.

Meier, M. F., 1960: Hydrologic regimen of a mountain glacier. Journal of Geophysical Research, 65(8): 2511 +.

Meier, M. F., 1959: IGY glacier research in the United States. Journal of Geophysical Research, 64(5): 586 + .