yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

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


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

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.

More Articles

View All
LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Khan Academy's science content creator on learning strategies
I’m Yuki, and I work as the science content manager. I work on the videos, exercises, and articles in our sciences—so biology, chemistry, and physics. “Failure is growth,” I think, is a motto I’ve seen upstairs. But yeah, for me, growth mindset is really …
15 Ways to Get Your Act Together For a New Chapter
7 years from now, it’s going to be 2031, almost 2032. And if you’re coming from the future, hello! Nice to have you here. But for now though, when this video is being made, it’s 2024, and you’re either in the middle of your long-term goals, at the end of …
Artificial Female Reproductive Tract Opens New Health Frontiers | National Geographic
[Music] Avatar being a virtual representation of a human being, and in this case, it’s a biological representation of the female reproductive tract. So, we call it Eva Tarr. The system that we’ve invented together with Draper laboratories is a series of …
Grace Garey Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015
Hey guys, thanks so much for having me. Like Kat said, I am with Watsi. Watsi is the first global crowdfunding platform for healthcare. So, the easiest way to explain it is you can go on our website and see photos and read stories of patients from all aro…
Laura Ling on Imprisonment in North Korea | Inside North Korea
In March of 2009, I was working on a documentary about North Korean defectors, people who are fleeing the very desperate conditions in North Korea. During that time, we were filming along the Tumen River. This is the river that separates China and North K…
The Gettysburg Address part 2
So we’ve been talking about the Gettysburg Address, which was delivered by Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863. As we were saying in the last video, it’s been about three and a half months since the Battle of Gettysburg when this speech is given, and Lin…