Loso and his coauthors tracked the speed of the glacier, the depth of waste buried just beneath its surface for years and studied feces buried in the snow for a year. They concluded that human waste buried in the ice of Kahiltna Glacier near an airstrip first used in 1954 will reemerge as early as 2025. They also found that “waste, though presently buried, is already contaminating the englacial water supply that feeds Kahiltna River and that it will further contaminate supraglacial meltwater once it emerges at the surface.”

Robinson, who is organizing a “Sustainable Summits” conference next September in Talkeetna with an agenda that includes managing human waste, said that a new park policy requiring Denali climbers to pack out all their waste is his hope for the future.

“I think that we’re close,” Robinson said. “With a little more education we can take it one step farther and take it all off.”

Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.