The Retreating Glaciers: Twenty-Five Left and Falling
Near Going To The Sun Road, Montana
The sign at Jackson Glacier Overlook has changed over the decades. Earlier generations of National Park Service interpretive text described the glacier in the present tense, as a living feature of the landscape, permanent in the way that mountains seem permanent. More recent signs describe what the glacier was. The shift in verb tense is not an accident. It reflects a decision by the park's interpreters to tell visitors the truth about what they are seeing.
When Glacier National Park was established in nineteen ten, it contained approximately one hundred fifty named glaciers. By the time of the most recent United States Geological Survey benchmarking, approximately twenty-five named glaciers remain. The rate of loss is not uniform; some years are worse than others, depending on winter snowpack and summer temperatures. But the direction is unchanged. The trajectory has not reversed.
The United States Geological Survey's Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, based in Bozeman, has maintained photographic documentation of the park's glaciers across more than a century. The comparison images are among the most direct visual evidence of climate change available in any American national park. The same glacier, photographed from the same location, decade by decade, retreating visibly into terrain that was once under ice.
The Geological Survey's earlier modeling, developed around the turn of the century, projected that the park's remaining glaciers could be gone by twenty thirty under a high-emissions warming scenario. More recent modeling shows a wide range of possible outcomes, from the twenty thirties under continued high emissions to well beyond that under slower warming. The direction and the urgency are the same.
Jackson Glacier, visible from this overlook, is one of the few named glaciers in the park that can be seen directly from the road. What you are looking at right now is smaller than what a visitor to this same overlook would have seen in nineteen sixty, and smaller still than what nineteen ten looked like. The park's name may outlast the ice that gave it reason.
