Side-by-side photos reveal Glacier National Park in Montana fast losing its glaciers

A national park known for its many large glaciers could end up having to change its name.

Glacier National Park in Montana shared details this week of how much the warming environment is impacting its glaciers, including side-by-side photos of Jackson Glacier.

The photos — one taken in August 1913 and the other in August 2020 — show the glacier went from covering a mountain side to looking like a river bed.

“Between 1966 and 2015, every one of the 26 named glaciers in the park got smaller. Some lost more than 80% of their area, but the average loss was about 40%,” Glacier National Park reported in a Sept. 15 Facebook post.

“Yes, the park’s glaciers are shrinking and the melting does have ecological consequences, but for many people, glacier retreat itself has become enough reason for concern. Losing the park’s glaciers could be a lesson about the significance of global warming. The loss of the park’s namesake could grab our attention and challenges us to imagine what the future could look like.”

The post comes at a time when global weather shifts are also being linked to 45 wildfires on the West Coast and three named storms being tracked across the Southeastern U.S. and southern Atlantic.

Glacier National Park reports the area had about 80 glaciers in the 1850s. Only 26 now meet the size requirements to be officially called glaciers, “nine fewer than in 1966,” the park says.

Researchers once suggested the park’s remaining glaciers would be too small to count as glaciers by 2030, but have backed off on being that specific. That’s due in part to the fact the glaciers are melting faster than initially expected, the park says.

“When will they be gone? ... Though the park’s glaciers are all getting smaller, variations in snow avalanches, ice flow dynamics, and ice thickness cause some glaciers to shrink faster than others,” the National Park Service reports.

“Sometimes a glacier will retreat very quickly where it was thinly and widely spread, only to shrink much more slowly when only the shaded, high elevation ice remains.”

Glaciers are known to “cycle through period of advance and retreat,” the NPS says. It’s believed the 26 glaciers that survive were at their biggest around 1850, when a warming trend began.

This story was originally published September 17, 2020 at 1:06 PM with the headline "Side-by-side photos reveal Glacier National Park in Montana fast losing its glaciers."