For ten thousand years the topography of what is now Glacier National Park, in northern Montana, has remained about the same. But the warming climate is melting the park's glaciers, threatening to change the tourist mecca into a Glacier Free National Park.
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. http://www.nytimes.com/...
The last glacial period, usually referred to as the Ice Age, ended around 12,000 years ago. Before its retreat "enough ice covered the Northern Hemisphere to lower sea levels 300 feet. In places near the park, ice was a mile deep."
Over thousands of years these glaciers have not retreated but have remained in a melt and freeze cycle, scouring "U" shaped valleys and creating horned mountain tops similar to those in the Swiss "Alps."
http://www.nps.gov/...
According to the USGS, which has documented the glacial retreat with their Repeat Photography Project, the park's glaciers will be gone in 15 years.
Glacier National Park’s namesake glaciers have receded rapidly since the Park’s establishment in 1910, primarily due to long-term changes in regional and global climate. In the last century, the five warmest years have occurred in the last 8 years - in this order: 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2004 (NASA). These changes include warming, particularly of daily minimum temperatures, and persistent droughts. This warming is ongoing and the loss of the Park’s glaciers continues, with the park’s glaciers predicted to disappear by 2030.
Follow below for more on the Repeat Photography Project and reasons why even Republicans should care about a Glacier Free National Park.
Climate change research in Glacier National Park employs many methods of documenting the unfortunate metamorphosis, including tracking the decline of the park’s namesake glaciers. "While less quantitative than other high-tech methods of recording glacial mass, depth, and rate of retreat, repeat photography has become a valuable tool for communicating effects of global warming." In other words facts and scientific data don't hold a candle to visual evidence. Because. You know. A picture . . .
Scientists at the United States Geological Survey began reviewing historic photographs of glaciers in the park archived over the last century, including high quality pictures taken by early photographers such as Morton Elrod, T.J. Hileman, Ted Marble, F.E. Matthes. Those historic photos were then compared with the current landscape.
I think you get the idea by now. Check out the
USGS web site for more. It is devastatingly clear how this is trending: only 26 named glaciers presently exist of the 150 glaciers present in 1850.
Republican climate change deniers gleefully point to the harsh winter storms that have hit the Midwest and Eastern U.S. as proof of "Global Cooling," but they are more interested in short term, localized weather events than in long term regional and global trends. And even if they begrudgingly admit that Climate Change is real and possibly partially anthropogenic, the solutions are just too radical for them to support because they cut into Koch Industries' profit margins and likewise funding for their campaigns. I propose they should take a closer look at the consequences of their "business before science" blindness.
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. In the Colorado Rockies, the median date of snowmelt shifted two to three weeks earlier from 1978 to 2007. In Washington, the Cascades lost nearly a quarter of their snowpack from 1930 to 2007. Every year, British Columbia’s glaciers shed the equivalent of 10 percent of the Mississippi River’s flow because of melting.
My guess is that those farmers who depend on summer flows generally vote Republican; and those fishermen mostly vote Republican; and those ski resort owners, yes they probably vote Republican. Why? Because they have been brain washed by the oligarchs and their bought and paid for representatives in both Washington D.C. and their state houses that Democratic sponsored regulations, taxes and other government interference in the free market are to blame. By the time the farmers, fishermen and business owners figure out they have been scammed, it will most likely too late.