Photo Evidence: Glacier National Park Is Melting Away | National Geographic

All the glaciers are shrinking. In the 1800s, they were estimated to be about 150 glaciers here; however, today we only have 25 glaciers. The glaciers are measured by a number of different ways. One of the most obvious ones is using repeat photography, where we go and occupy a site from which a photographer took a picture in, say, nineteen ten, and then we photograph that from exactly the same spot.

Once you go every several years, to five years or ten years, that's when you see the really big changes. When we first started this project, we thought every other year was going to be too much, but recently we've seen so much glacier change that now we are increasing our frequency of repeating photographs or visiting glaciers. You can see that it's all melted away; the lake has gotten bigger. All this ice is contributed to the water and has retreated back up towards the head of the mountain.

I also do things that are a little bit more modern, such as taking precision global positioning systems and going along the margins of the ice, so that we can look at changes in the area of the ice through time. Glacier National Park is an excellent natural laboratory to examine the effects of climate change. This area is actually warming at two to three times the rate of the global average rise in air temperatures.

So, these increased air temperatures are decreasing the snowpack and the glaciers in the high country and increasing disturbance events, like wildfires that we're experiencing. Some of the species that we're studying, these aquatic insects, might be the first species actually to go extinct due to the effects of global climate change. We've already seen a contraction in the distribution of some of these species in comparison to collections that were done back in the 1960s.

Even though glaciers may seem disconnected and far away to people, they actually affect a lot of things downstream. That's even evident in other things, such as the way that the snowpack affects the huckleberry crop, and this is, of course, a vital food source for grizzly bears. Animals that live in these upper elevations are adapted to the colder temperatures there, and because we're predicting warmer temperatures, they may be particularly vulnerable to these changes.

They also have very specific food needs, and the food changes for them could also influence their ability to thrive. In spite of the fact that it will be different in the future, it's still going to be a valuable asset to Americans, both as a research outdoor laboratory and maybe as a kind of iconic lesson as to what climate change can do to natural landscapes.