The National Park Service
Glaciers and Climate Change
Video

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Well, Glacier is a wonderful place in many regards, but one of them is that it's a valuable research asset.

This is one of the few places in the world where we can look at mountain ecosystems with all their pieces intact, relatively undisturbed, relatively pristine and we can figure out how mountain ecosystems respond to things like climate change.

So we've had a research program here since 1991 that focuses on climate change and this means that we have to look at many many different parts of the ecosystem, not only individually but eventually to integrate all these into one sort of synthetic idea of how the whole system works.

One of the most obvious responders to climate change are the glaciers in Glacier National Park, and this has been something that the public has really responded to. It's very intuitive that ice melts when it gets warmer, they [the public] have a charismatic attraction to glaciers.  Glaciers are photographable so they have discrete boundaries, and so glaciers have been kind of the barometer for climate change across the whole mountain system.

And, the glaciers have been going away. We used to have 150 glaciers in Glacier Park and probably most of those, were counted in 1910 when this park was founded. Right now we say that we have about 27 glaciers left but with some of the new data that we will be analysing this fall we expect that number will drop, possibly considerably. Many of our glaciers are very, very small and just hanging on by their fingernails. And I think that with a hot summer like we've had, many of them have probably retreated even more.

So glaciers are important ...and we've lost most of them, but it's not just that they are a visual indication of change on the landscape, they also have direct importance to the rest of the ecosystem. For instance when the glaciers are gone in a headwaters of a basin, that means there's not a source of water late in the summer when all the snowpacks are gone....the soil moisture is more or less depleted, often we have forest fires going on like we did this past summer...and that is when the ice is providing, through it's meltwater, the vital source of water for some of our streams.

And that of course is where our trout and species of concern, like the bull trout, are living and they need cold water as well...and so we've seen that in many cases as the glaciers retreat and become smaller and smaller not only is the total volume of water going down but we're also seeing that water temperature go up.

So, the highest mountain with the glaciers on the top...to the valley bottom with the stream, insects and the trout responding to this whole ecosystem change, that in turn is responding to climate variability and climate change, shows you that everything is an integrated whole.