What Is Going on With the Glaciers at Glacier National Park?

[rangerrebew]

What Is Going on With the Glaciers at Glacier National Park?
20 hours ago Guest Blogger 47 Comments
It has now been seven years since the government’s glacier-size tables have been updated

By Roger Roots, J.D., Ph.D.

              For the past seven years I have journeyed to Glacier National Park (GNP) during the second week of September to observe the state of the glaciers at their lowest point of each year.  I also try to observe the state of the official literature, signage, films and lectures on the topic of glacier size.

              In the spring of 2019 I broke the story that National Park Service had quietly removed signs in GNP which predicted the glaciers would all be gone by 2020.  They removed these signs during the winter when the visitor facilities were closed to the public.  In the past three years the government has transitioned to claims that the glaciers are steadily melting but no one can predict precisely when they’ll disappear.

              The average date of first freeze in East Glacier is September 13, and this is generally when the glaciers stop melting and begin growing again.  It is only then that comparisons can be made with prior years.  However, official U.S. government websites show images of GNP’s glaciers with captions giving just the years; not the calendar dates.  By juxtapositioning a photo from, say, “1911,” showing a huge glacier, next to a photo of the same glacier—much diminished—from, say, “2009,” these government websites seek to depict the glaciers as steadily melting. See here, here, and here.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/10/29/what-is-going-on-with-the-glaciers-at-glacier-national-park/

[Hoodat]

We should return to the days when Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit were covered with glaciers.

[Smokin Joe]

We should return to the days when Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit were covered with glaciers.

The residents would migrate south. Not a viable solution for the folks in east St. Louis...

Besides, it would wreck my home value. The last time the glaciers were that far south, the ice was over a mile thick here.

[Hoodat]

If it got to that, the libs would be using nukes to keep the ice away.

[roamer_1]

I can speak directly about Grinnel glacier...

Most of the pictures 'proving' the warming trend are bullcrap. What they do is find pictures in the wayback that come from a spring/early summer time frame, and then compare those to current pictures from late fall.

Early summer, there is still a ton of snowpack on the glacier so it looks way bigger. By late fall, the glacier is always diminished.

That ain't quite true, but true enough. I remember right out of high school by a year or two (so early 80s maybe), it was getting pretty small, and there was talk that it might be having trouble... But we were in a multi-year drought without much snow... Then we had an extraordinarily bad winter (probably '98), and I was up there shortly after, and the glacier was entirely restored to its former glory... In one winter.

It's been a while now since I was up that way, but I would reckon the same dynamics apply. I wouldn't worry much.

[Hoodat]

The growth of the glacier depends more on precipitation than it does temperature.