Preface. Roger Roots is the author who gave us this previous story Glacier National Park Quietly Removes ‘Will Disappear in 2020’ Sign. ~ cr
By Roger Roots JD, Ph.D.,
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Park Service (NPS) have committed massive resources to advance the narrative of glacier melt in Glacier National Park (GNP). Various USGS and NPS markers, brochures, websites, and films have predicted catastrophic melting of the Park’s glaciers in the near future. During the winter of 2018-19, while the Park facilities were closed to the public, government employees quietly removed signs predicting the Park’s glaciers would disappear by 2020. .
Since 2015, USGS and NPS have prominently displayed data sheets on their websites showing that GNP’s glaciers have been steadily decreasing every half a decade. Data sheets are often referenced in news stories to describe the plight of receding glaciers.
Measuring glaciers can be quite challenging. Many glaciers have strange shapes. Glaciers are not always snow-white and can even be brown or earth-colored due to rock or soil deposition. Calendar dates and temporary weather changes can make a big difference. Fresh snow can easily obscure the contours of glacier boundaries. The USGS is said to use satellites or aircraft to take pictures of the glacier from the air and then calculate the area from such pictures. (In earlier years, the USGS had apparently calculated such glacier sizes from old photographs. There were a lot of problems with this, to say the least.)
But for all the government resources dedicated to the size of glaciers at GNP in recent years, the official table hasn’t been updated since 2015 – SIX the previous year. (And as I write these words, the table isn’t on the USGS pages.) Last fall, I emailed officials at USPS and asked. A USGS scientist named Caitlyn Florentine responded by stating, “We want to update the glacier margin dataset whenever a late-summer, cloudless, smoke-free satellite image is available. GNP glaciers.” “This has not happened in the last few years. . . . ”
Just last weekend, Dr. Florentine emailed me that “Aerial images of glaciers in Glacier National Park have been collected [during the Fall]“Preparation for publication is underway. ”
Why is this important? Because the summer of 2021 is unusually hot and dry across Montana and the Rocky Mountains. Many sites near the National Park have experienced heat waves and set records for reserves. Data to be released soon will likely show new record lows for Glacier Park’s 35 or more glaciers. And these new low numbers may not accurately reflect the true trajectory of size change between GNP glaciers.
Before the 2021 heatwaves, many observers (myself included) noticed that the glacier’s melting rate had largely stabilized over the past decade. In fact, there have been several recent winters with record cold and snowfall. An MSc thesis by Melissa Carrie Brett at Portland State University, “Glacier Inventory and Change in Glacier National Park,” found that the GNP’s glaciers were melting at a faster rate than before the 1970s. compared to later years – thus contradicting the hypothetical global-warming-catastrophe-CO2.
To recap: in the very near future, the USGS is likely to release data showing that GNP’s glaciers are steadily melting, consistent with climate change theory; but a decision by the USGS to delay measurements to 2019 or 2020 and instead measure glaciers after the extremely hot summer of 2021 would significantly undermine such a conclusion.
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