Glaciers, Glacier National Park, and Global Climate Change

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Glacier National Park was named after the glaciers that carved and sculpted its landscape millions of years ago. But according to the Glacier National Park Web site by 2030 there will be no glaciers left in the park, the result of global climate change. The park originally had around 150 glaciers, but today there are 26.

Grinnell Glacier is one of those 26, and is a popular hiking destination. Here's a recent photo, taken earlier this month during a stormy hike to the glacier's edge. The photo shows Upper Grinnell Lake in the foreground, the edge of the Grinnell Glacier to its left, and the Salamander Glacier and Salamander Falls above the lake.

According to Wikipedia, Grinnell Glacier is one of the most photographed glaciers in the park. Photos dating back to the mid-1800s have been archived, providing documentation of the glacial retreat over the years (shown below from Wikipedia):

The USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center has more details and photographs.

We can also take a look at Grinnell Glacier using ArcGIS Explorer. First we used the GeoNames Search task (covered in a previous post) to locate the glacier.

Here's the glacier as seen in Explorer's default map.

We can add the topo layer (from the layers tab on the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center) for another perspective.

Comparing the imagery with the older topographic map using the transparency or swipe tools, we can see the change in the size of the lake and the glacier's boundary.

ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Glacier National Park

Glaciers, Glacier National Park, and Global Climate Change