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The changes in Grinnell didn’t stand out, especially because other aspects of the timeless landscape looked so much the same. This summer, in between stints at devastating fires near Denver and in Oregon, Frye found time to make a nostalgic trip back to the lookout he staffed 32 years ago.
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His view included several glaciers, including Grinnell, the park’s most famous.Īt 54, Frye is the park’s chief ranger and one of 16 Type I incident commanders charged with fighting the country’s most complex forest fires. In 1970, on his first park job, he sat in the Swiftcurrent lookout tower watching for fires out across the Continental Divide. The son of a seasonal ranger, Steve Frye spent his boyhood summers exploring the park’s forests and peaks. Some of this epochal change can be hard to detect, particularly for those who have spent much of their lives in the park. Alaska’s glaciers are in dramatic retreat as well. Most glaciers that remain there are rock glaciers - flowing fields of rock interspersed with ice that don’t look glacial at all. The handful of “itty-bitty” glaciers in the Sierra Nevada “are glaciers only by the most technical sense of the term,” Kargel said. Most casual visitors to these mountains have little idea that most glaciers in the Lower 48 are on the way out. “It’s not all doom and gloom,” Kargel said.
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Those who stand at the edge of retreating glaciers are likely standing where no human has stood before. But soon, lichens, grasses and wildflowers grow. It may look devastated, scarred and littered with boulders. The terrain left behind by a retreating glacier is like land recovering from fire, Kargel said. The color is a product of light reflecting off “glacial flour,” or ground-up rock that floats in meltwater. Glaciers often drip away into milky lakes of “unusual, gorgeous, turquoise, practically indescribable color,” said Jeffrey Kargel, a USGS scientist who monitors many of the world’s wasting glaciers from space. To glaciologists who thrill to see the groaning dynamics of ice in real time, there still is beauty in the rocky new landscapes. “It’s still a beautiful mountain, but without glaciers, an identity is lost.” “When the permanent parts of the landscape start disappearing, that’s unsettling,” said Fagre, who has lived and worked in the park for more than a decade. These scientists know they are recording the last vestiges of a world that may soon exist only in their computers, photographs and memories - a world their grandchildren may never see. While the team has spent much of its tenure here talking about stream flow data, snowfall records and vegetation dynamics, they have started talking about something new: the loss of beauty. “It makes you question what you know,” said Fagre, “which is the real point of science.” For example, even as most glaciers here race toward extinction, a handful seem to effortlessly maintain their grip on mountain peaks. The transformation of the park has turned out to be far more complex than anyone imagined. “Being here is like having a front row seat at the Indianapolis 500.”īut for all the gigabytes of data the team has accumulated, they realize they have only scratched the surface. “The scariest thing to me is realizing how fast these things are happening,” said Blase Reardon, 39, an avalanche expert who has worked in the park for the last two years. They have only decades left - nothing at all in geological time - to understand these ancient frozen beasts before they disappear. The unexpected speed of the demise of the glaciers has left scientists racing against time. Geological Survey team working to chronicle climate change in this park known as the Crown of the Continent. “It’s not just going to happen in my lifetime,” said Dan Fagre, a 49-year-old ecologist who leads the U.S. It is an omen even a child can grasp in an instant: Ice that has lasted in these high alpine valleys since the end of the Stone Age will soon vanish. The dwindling glaciers amid the deeply chiseled landscape of this national park offer the clearest and most visible sign of climate change in America. Grinnell Glacier, beloved by tourists and scientists alike, has lost 90% of its volume since 1850. The cold slivers that remain are disintegrating so fast that scientists estimate the park will have no glaciers in 30 years.īoulder Glacier, once massive enough to contain a human-dwarfing ice cave, was gone by 1998. When naturalists first hiked through Glacier National Park more than a century ago, 150 glaciers graced its high cliffs and jagged peaks.