It has now been seven years because the authorities’s glacier-size tables have been up to date
By Roger Roots, J.D., Ph.D.
For the previous seven years I’ve journeyed to Glacier Nationwide Park (GNP) throughout the second week of September to look at the state of the glaciers at their lowest level of every yr. I additionally attempt to observe the state of the official literature, signage, movies and lectures on the subject of glacier dimension.
Within the spring of 2019 I broke the story that Nationwide Park Service had quietly eliminated indicators in GNP which predicted the glaciers would all be passed by 2020. They eliminated these indicators throughout the winter when the customer services had been closed to the general public. Up to now three years the federal government has transitioned to claims that the glaciers are steadily melting however nobody can predict exactly after they’ll disappear.
The typical date of first freeze in East Glacier is September 13, and that is usually when the glaciers cease melting and start rising once more. It is just then that comparisons might be made with prior years. Nonetheless, official U.S. authorities web sites present pictures of GNP’s glaciers with captions giving simply the years; not the calendar dates. By juxtapositioning a photograph from, say, “1911,” displaying an enormous glacier, subsequent to a photograph of the identical glacier—a lot diminished—from, say, “2009,” these authorities web sites search to depict the glaciers as steadily melting. See right here, right here, and right here.
However anybody who lives in glacier nation is aware of that glaciers usually develop every year for 9 months and soften for 3 months. An image taken in July will present a glacier a lot bigger than an image of the identical glacier taken in September.
Lots of the Park’s glaciers are very distant, requiring a 20-mile-plus, one-way backpacking journey deep in grizzly bear nation. There are nonetheless a number of I’ve by no means seen. As Patrick Moore has noticed, many of the media’s environmental scare tales are based mostly on issues that “are both invisible, like CO2 and radiation, or very distant, like polar bears and coral reefs.”
THE PROBLEM OF THE USGS’S GLACIER SIZE TABLES
For a few years, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has revealed a knowledge desk purporting to indicate precise measurements of GNP’s glaciers starting in 1966. The entries within the desk are curious for quite a lot of causes, starting with the lack-of-calendar-date drawback already talked about. And the entries for the yr 1966 are claimed to be derived from “unique 1966 aerial imagery.” But hyperlinks related to the information point out the “imagery” consists of “topographic maps” derived from apparently long-lost aerial images. This can be a little like making an attempt to estimate whole gallons of water within the Mississippi River in 1966 based mostly on the width of the river depicted in a 1966 Rand McNally street atlas.
Glaciers are notoriously tough to measure as a result of they typically have odd contours. Nonetheless, the USGS purports to have the ability to say with precision that between 1966 and 2015 (once more, no calendar dates), the Agassiz Glacier melted 83 %, the Ahern Glacier diminished 33 %, the Blackfoot Glacier decreased by 70 %, and so forth. For essentially the most half the favored and scientific press repeats these information claims with out problem.
Oddly, given the latest enhance in standard alarmism over world warming, the federal government hasn’t up to date their glacier dimension tables in seven (7) years. My emails to the undertaking supervisor of the USGS have yielded assurances that the USGS is “on monitor to replace USGS geodetic glacier information this fall.” The USGS reportedly took aerial pictures final yr (2021) on the finish of an especially scorching and dry summer season.
On September 10, 2022, my brother Alex and I snapped footage of the Grinnell Glacier within the central space of the Nationwide Park. We then in contrast 2022 with an image taken on August 26, 2010. You’ll be able to see that the Glacier has not appreciably modified dimension in TWELVE years. In truth, the 2010 picture (taken by USGS scientist Daniel Fagre) was taken with two weeks of melting left to go earlier than the top of soften season in 2010).
So it seems the USGS could also be having difficulties making ready its information desk for publication. Once they launch the brand new information, I’ll present an replace.
