Glacier National Park Turns 100, With Maybe 10 Years Left For Its Glaciers

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. — Age has not been kind to Glacier National Park. The gorgeous million-acre park in northwestern Montana celebrated its 100th birthday on Tuesday. But many of its glaciers have melted, and scientists predict the rest may not last another decade.

The forests are drier and disease-ridden, leading to bigger wildfires. Climate change is forcing animals that feed off plants to adapt.

Many experts consider Glacier Park a harbinger of Earth's future, a laboratory where changes in the environment will likely show up first. "What national parks all give us is, in effect, a controlled landscape where we can see the natural and climatic processes at work," said Steve Running, a University of Montana professor and co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in 2007 for his work on climate change.

Average temperatures have risen in the park 1.8 times faster than the global average, said Dan Fagre, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist. The change is visible to the naked eye, with the vast moraines left behind as the giant glaciers melt away. Climate change is blamed for the increasing size and frequency of wildfires, and lower stream flows as summer progresses. What this all means for the bears, wolves and other big predators in the park is unclear, Fagre said.

EDIT

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-05-11-glacier-national-park_N.htm

and cried. He isn't THAT old that his old glacier buddies should be so small or even gone now.

We will keep our memories, and not return to Glacier. :cry:

An awesome sight, huge, white, and a complete lack of trees, unless you could see far down a mountain side. To think that they crawled several feet a year in those days really opened my mind to scope, size, and how small humans, even humans on horseback, were.

Sounds like the redhead down the road...