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Climate Change Threatens to Strip the Identity of Glacier National Park
Climate Change Threatens to Strip the Identity of Glacier National Park
11/22/14
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. — What will they call this place once the glaciers are gone?
A century ago, this sweep of mountains on the Canadian border boasted some 150 ice sheets, many of them scores of feet thick, plastered across summits and tucked into rocky fissures high above parabolic valleys. Today, perhaps 25 survive.
In 30 years, there may be none.
A warming climate is melting Glacier’s glaciers, an icy retreat that promises to change not just tourists’ vistas, but also the mountains and everything around them.
Streams fed by snowmelt are reaching peak spring flows weeks earlier than in the past, and low summer flows weeks before they used to. Some farmers who depend on irrigation in the parched days of late summer are no longer sure that enough water will be there. Bull trout, once pan-fried over anglers’ campfires, are now caught and released to protect a population that is shrinking as water temperatures rise.
Many of the mom-and-pop ski areas that once peppered these mountains have closed. Increasingly, the season is not long enough, nor the snows heavy enough, to justify staying open.
What is happening here is occurring, to greater or lesser extents, in mountains across the North American West.
...Glaciers are essentially a reservoir of water held back for decades, and they’re releasing that water in August when it’s hot, and streams otherwise might have low flows or no flows,” Daniel B. Fagre, a United States Geological Survey research ecologist, said in an interview. “As glaciers disappear, there will be a reduction in the water at the same time that demand is going up. I think we’re on the cusp of bigger changes.”
But shrinking glaciers are only the visible symptom of much broader and more serious changes. “We’re a snow-driven ecosystem, and glaciers are just a part of that,” Dr. Fagre said. “The way the snow goes is the way our ecosystem goes.”....
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/us/climate-change-threatens-to-strip-the-identity-of-glacier-national-park.html?_r=0
11/22/14
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. — What will they call this place once the glaciers are gone?
A century ago, this sweep of mountains on the Canadian border boasted some 150 ice sheets, many of them scores of feet thick, plastered across summits and tucked into rocky fissures high above parabolic valleys. Today, perhaps 25 survive.
In 30 years, there may be none.
A warming climate is melting Glacier’s glaciers, an icy retreat that promises to change not just tourists’ vistas, but also the mountains and everything around them.
Streams fed by snowmelt are reaching peak spring flows weeks earlier than in the past, and low summer flows weeks before they used to. Some farmers who depend on irrigation in the parched days of late summer are no longer sure that enough water will be there. Bull trout, once pan-fried over anglers’ campfires, are now caught and released to protect a population that is shrinking as water temperatures rise.
Many of the mom-and-pop ski areas that once peppered these mountains have closed. Increasingly, the season is not long enough, nor the snows heavy enough, to justify staying open.
What is happening here is occurring, to greater or lesser extents, in mountains across the North American West.
...Glaciers are essentially a reservoir of water held back for decades, and they’re releasing that water in August when it’s hot, and streams otherwise might have low flows or no flows,” Daniel B. Fagre, a United States Geological Survey research ecologist, said in an interview. “As glaciers disappear, there will be a reduction in the water at the same time that demand is going up. I think we’re on the cusp of bigger changes.”
But shrinking glaciers are only the visible symptom of much broader and more serious changes. “We’re a snow-driven ecosystem, and glaciers are just a part of that,” Dr. Fagre said. “The way the snow goes is the way our ecosystem goes.”....
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/us/climate-change-threatens-to-strip-the-identity-of-glacier-national-park.html?_r=0