Community | April 08, 2010 | 26 comments

Glacier National Park loses two more

source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36224913/ns/us_news-environment/

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JanforGore

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36224913/ns/us_news-environment/

BILLINGS, Mont. - Glacier National Park has lost two more of its namesake moving icefields to climate change, which is shrinking the rivers of ice until they grind to a halt, a government researcher said Wednesday.

Warmer temperatures have reduced the number of named glaciers in the northwestern Montana park to 25, said Dan Fagre said, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He warned many of the rest of the glaciers may be gone by the end of the decade.

"It's continual," Fagre said. "When we're measuring glacier margins, by the time we go home the glacier is already smaller than what we've measured."

The meltoff shows the climate is changing, but does not show exactly what is causing temperatures to go up, Fagre said.

The park's glaciers have been slowly melting away since about 1850, when the centuries-long Little Ice Age ended. They once numbered as many as 150, and 37 of those glaciers eventually were named.

A glacier needs to be 25 acres to qualify for the title. The two that no longer classify were named the Shepard Glacier and the Miche Wabun Glacier.

If a glacier shrinks any smaller, it does not always stop moving right away. A smaller mass of ice on a steep slope would still continue to grind its way through the Rocky Mountains.

Fagre led a team that updated a 2005 USGS review of glaciers in the park. Back then, 10 glaciers had been found to have disappeared in recent decades.

Local warming cited

The USGS work was mentioned in a report released Wednesday by two environmental groups, the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Their report cited data from a weather station inside Glacier National Park that shows the average temperature for the last decade there was 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the station's 1950-1979 average.

"That is exactly double the average global temperature increase of 1 degree F in the past decade, again compared to a 1950-1979 baseline," the groups stated.

Fagre's team estimates that in 1850 some 150 glaciers were in the boundaries of today's park. A 2003 study predicted that all remaining park glaciers would vanish by 2030, but the team now states that "their disappearance may occur even sooner, as many of the glaciers have recently retreated faster than their predicted rates."

continued.
  1. groups:
    Community,   News and Politics,   Green,   Earth and Science,   2 more
  2. tags:
    Environment,  Climate Change,  Glacier Melt,  Montana,  3 more
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26 comments // Glacier National Park loses two more

  • Adam_Wreford
  • Wetdog
    • +1
      Wetdog  

    • Has anyone else who read this ever actually BEEN to Glacier NP?

      Glacier is one of my favorite parks. There is no place else on earth that is like it.

      This is what makes me sad.

      I don't see how anyone who has ever been there could read this without feeling sad that it is disappearing. And it is for nothing. It doesn't have to happen.

      We can use natural gas instead of coal and petroleum. That is all we have to do. Boil water with natural gas instead of coal to make electricity. Mandate that all new vehicles sold in the US have to be able to use natural gas and biofuels.

      Natural gas(methane) produces the same energy---with no air pollution, and no strip mines----and produces less than 1/2 the CO2 that coal does.

      Natural gas powered vehicles produce no air pollution, and driving the same distance produces 1/3 less CO2 than petroleum. And costs about 1/2 petroleum does.

      We can make methane cheaply and easily out of anything organic---even sewage.

      And we can very easily and inexpensively add solar thermal to existing natural gas systems to heat buildings and water.

      Use the gas we save by heating buildings and water to run our vehicles, and we are in effect, running our vehicles on solar energy. No batteries required.

      What is so hard about that? We can do everything we want done, we can do it cheaper than using coal and petroleum, we can breathe easier, and we can reverse atmospheric warming.

      I think we should just do it.

    • 3 years ago
  • Wetdog
  • CaptB
    • 0
      CaptB  

    • Fact: humans are impacting the earth in negative ways. Such as the deforestation of the rain forest. The plastic heap we have floating in the Pacific Ocean hundreds of miles large. The pollution we leak into rivers (arsenic and cyanide as well as things I can't spell). The ozone layer being depleted. Air pollution in cities where they have smog alerts.

    • 3 years ago
  • JanforGore
  • Armageddon_Now
  • danitassin
    • -2
      danitassin  

    • I see it every time it rains at high tide. Over the last five years the water has gotten a foot higher each year. My yard will be non existant in 10 years.

    • 3 years ago
  • Chapisbored
  • Chapisbored
    • -2
      Chapisbored  

    • Pictures like that interest me a lot. If for every spot there used to be a glacier there was a picture like that then it would still be an attraction. It's a blatant display of climate change. I can't see that here.

    • 3 years ago
  • likeamazing
  • Wetdog
  • likeamazing
  • dalistuff
    • 0
      dalistuff  

    • I'm pretty sure they'll fix if it meant loss of money. There are machines located around the world that may alter weather patterns . Science is true until proven wrong, not because some one told you it's true.

    • 3 years ago
  • zakthezomb13
  • outtheinside
    • +2
      outtheinside  

    • that's the funny thing about weather patterns - they constantly change. give it another ten years and they'll be wondering why we predicted that they would all disappear. give another 50 and we could add just as many, if not more, than the 10 that disappeared "in recent decades". it's a dangerous thing to make decades long forecasts over historical data. it's like forecasting long-term trends on anything based on the history. if it were as easy as fitting something to a historical trend, we'd know everything.

    • 3 years ago
  • Kurta
    • +1
      Kurta  
    • outtheinside:

      Well stated. It's hard to know what sort of alarm to raise and to what degree. i think that overlooking red flags like this could be dangerous. But doomsaying is just as dangerous. The trends toward a human-induced change convince me that there's a problem. I think that in analyzing the trends the scientists must understand the catylists and go from there. To me it seems more than a coincidence that such dramatic change parallels human expansion. Most of the natural biosphere is fairly constant. Humans are anything but constant. I suppose a good argument could be that the background weather trends are subject to a myryad of factors that to single out mankind as the sole contributor is unfair. If you look into extinctions such as the Permian there is not a single antagonist but at least 3, maybe more. I like to err on the side of caution personally.

    • 3 years ago
  • Wetdog
  • Kurta
    • -1
      Kurta  

    • I get a shiver when I envision the world of the future. i think it's plain to see that the majority of the damage is irreversable. The remainder of preventable loss is still getting lost in legal loopholes and questionable politics. To see a story like this in the news has become akin to the "cat in the tree''. People will say "aww" but assume someone else will handle it. I hope for a day when a story like this tops any celebrity gossip in popularity. I don't know about anyone else but I fight the urge to read stories about climate change. It's like getting punched in the stomach every time.

    • 3 years ago
  • dudefromtherock
  • NothingIsAbsoluteTruth
  • Darevalo
  • Varex_Sythe
  • JanforGore
  • Varex_Sythe
    • 0
      Varex_Sythe  
    • JanforGore:

      Well, I do the best I can. All I can say is that if we don't succeed in curbing this, when the Antarctic Ice cap melts and the ocean rises 20+feet, I'm not putting up with any asshat climate change deniers crying about needing to resettle. They can be up a creek of shit on their own if that happens.

    • 3 years ago
  • JanforGore
  • JanforGore
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