Ice Worm Habitats

Recently I was surprised to learn that ice worms are found occasionally in glaciers of the Alaska Range. Ice worms are numerous in the warmer glaciers of southeastern Alaska, British Columbia and Washington State, but they cannot tolerate temperatures much below zero.

Real ice worms--not the spaghetti and ink concoctions of Klondike poet Robert Service--live in pools of water and crawl around between ice crystals near the glacier surface. When I expressed amazement that ice worms could exist in the comparatively cool glaciers of the Alaska Range, glacier expert Larry Mayo of the United States Geological Survey stated that the glaciers there are not necessarily all that cold.

Even though temperatures in the mountains are subfreezing many months of the year, glaciologist Mayo points out that the Alaska Range glaciers do contain water in liquid form the year around. From time to time, crevasses become water-filled. Also, channels cut in the glacier ice by running water sometimes get blocked up and then fill with water.

In winter the water near the edges of these bodies freezes into ice rinds that may be several tens of centimeters thick. Even so, if a pool of water is big enough, its center remains unfrozen, proving that the temperature at depth can remain above freezing.

Ice worms have been observed to move around in the ice at depths near two meters (six feet). Even in the Alaska Range, the glacier ice at that depth obviously can remain near freezing and so can provide at least a marginal ice worm habitat. But life there can't be easy. Perhaps it's as Robert Service said:

And as no nourishment they find,
to keep themselves alive.
They masticate each other's tails,
till just the Tough survive.