By Jim Bloch
In the Lower 48 states, the most famous location to visit glaciers – those slabs of ice larger than 25 acres that are so heavy they move under their own weight – is Glacier National Park in Montana.
To see them, you might want to hurry. In 1850, there were 80 glaciers within what would become the park boundaries when it was established in 1910. By 1966, there were 37 named glaciers in the park. Between 1966 and 2015, they decreased in size by about 34 percent. Eleven had disappeared altogether.
“Glacier National Park is warming at nearly two times the global average and the impacts are already being felt by park visitors,” according to the park’s website. “The most notorious impact of climate change in the park is the shrinking glaciers.”
The disappearing glaciers have been accompanied by a dramatic increase in wildfires, which have doubled in terms of annual acreage scorched in the West since 1980.
Disappearing glacial tourism can mean big business.
“A new National Park Service report shows that 2,933,616 visitors to Glacier National Park in 2023 spent $372,129,000 in communities near the park,” reported the park Sept. 6, 2024. “That spending supported 5,725 jobs in the local area and had a cumulative benefit to the local economy of $554,585,000.”
The driving force behind the disappearance of glaciers has been the warming of the world’s air and sea temperatures over the last 175 years due to the burning of fossil fuels, which emits carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gases into the atmosphere. The CO2 acts as a sort of chemical lid on the Earth, holding in the heat from the sun.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the surface air temperature of the planet has risen two degrees Fahrenheit since 1850 and the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2014. The global average surface temperature of the world’s seas has risen 2.8 degrees F since 1901, according to the National Environmental Education Foundation. Taken together, these increases have meant that the world is
warmer now than it has been in 120,000 years, when wooly mammoths were munching through the grasslands of northern North America.
International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation
On Jan. 21, the United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Meteorological Organization launched the International Year of the Glaciers’ Preservation.
“This global initiative highlights the critical role of glaciers in providing freshwater to billions of people worldwide, while emphasizing the urgent threat posed by climate change to their very existence,” according to a report by Climate Central on the effort, released Jan. 31. Climate Central is a nonprofit organization that studies the impacts of climate change worldwide.
As part of the year-long awareness campaign, March 21 has been named World Day for Glaciers.
“Human-caused climate change is causing glaciers to melt at an alarming rate, contributing to sea-level rise and jeopardizing the very existence of these vital natural resources,” said the organization. “Seven of the ten years with the most significant glacier mass loss have occurred since 2010, highlighting the accelerating pace of glacial retreat in recent decades.”
The 18,000 glaciers within 50 UNESCO World Heritage sites are losing 58 billion tons of ice per year.
“In the next 25 years, a third of these glaciers are projected to vanish entirely, impacting renowned tourist destinations such as Los Glaciares National Park in Argentina and Vatnajokull National Park in Iceland,” the report said.
A 2021 study published in the journal Nature found that glacial melt 2000-2019 accounted for 21 percent of sea level rise during that period.
Every continent except Australia is home to glaciers.
Ice sheets and glaciers cover almost 10 percent of the Earth’s surface, storing 70 percent of the globe’s fresh water and playing a key role in the planetary climate.
“Referred to as ‘water towers of the world,’ glaciers provide freshwater for billions of people, support diverse ecosystems, contribute to clean energy production, and serve as invaluable archives of past and present climate conditions,” report said. “Glacial loss poses significant risks to communities, including disrupting tourism economies, eroding cultural heritage and increasing vulnerability to hazards such as landslides, avalanches, tsunamis and glacial lake outburst floods.”
The rapid melting of glaciers has created larger and more numerous glacial lakes, increasing the chances of outburst floods and other dangers such as landslides and avalanches. About 15 million people are at risk of such floods, especially in India, Pakistan, China and Peru.
“Some mountainous regions of the U.S. also reside in the glacial lake outburst flood danger zone, particularly in Washington State and Alaska,” the report said. “In August 2023, a major outburst flood from Mendenhall Glacier caused significant flooding in Juneau, Alaska. This event, unprecedented in its scale, would not have been possible without the influence of climate change.”
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
