Photo Evidence: Glacier National Park Is Melting Away
Oct. 21, 2015 - Glacier National Park is losing its iconic glaciers to a changing climate. In the mid-1800s, this Montana landscape was covered by 150 glaciers—today only 25 remain. To show the decrease in glacier size, scientists from the USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center photograph the same areas where glaciers were photographed in the early 1900s. Dan Fagre, a USGS research ecologist, has been studying climate change in the park for more than 20 years. Fagre and his colleagues discuss what melting glaciers and climate change mean for the future of the park, which is expected to be nearly glacier free by 2030, based on present warming trends.
Transcript
Dan Fagre
USGS Research Ecologist
All the glaciers are shrinking.
In the 1800s there were estimated to be about 150 glaciers here, however today we only have 25 glaciers.
The glaciers are measured by a number of different ways, one of the most obvious ones is using repeat photography, where we go and occupy a site from which a photographer took a picture from say in 1910, and then we re-photograph that from exactly the same spot.
Once you go every several years to five years or 10 years, that's when you see the really big changes.
When we first started this project we thought every other year was gonna be too much, but recently we've seen so much glacier change that now we are increasing our frequency, repeating photographs or visiting glaciers.
You can see that it's all melted away, the lake has gotten bigger, all this ice is contributed to the water and is retreating back up towards the head wall of the mountain.
We also do things that are a little bit more modern such as taking global positioning systems and going along ht margins of the ice so that we can look at the changes in the area of the ice through time.
Clint Muhlfeld
USGS Research Ecologist
Glacier National Park is an excellent natural laboratory to examine the effects of climate change. This area is actually warming at two to three times the rate of the global average rise in air temperatures. So these increased air temperatures are decreasing the snow pack and the glaciers in the high country. And increasing disturbance events like wildfire that we're experiencing.
Joe Giersch
USGS Aquatic Entomologist
Some of the species that we're studying, these aquatic insects, might be the first species actually to go extinct due to the effects of global climate change. We've already seen a contraction in the distribution of some of these species in comparison to collections that were done back in the 1960s.
Dan Fagre
Even though glaciers might seem disconnected and far away to people, they actually effect a lot of people downstream, and that's even evident in other things such as the way that the snowpack effects the huckleberry crop, and this is of course a vital food source for grizzly bears.
Tabitha Graves
USGS Research Ecologist
Animals that live in these upper elevations are adapted to the colder temperatures there and because we're predicting warmer temperatures, they may be particularly vulnerable to these changes. They also have very specific food needs and the food changes for them could also influence their ability to thrive.
Dan Fagre
In spite of the fact that it will be different in the future, it's still going to be a valuable asset to Americans, both as a research outdoor laboratory, and maybe as an iconic lesson as to what climate change can do to natural landscapes.
