Who’ll Want to Vacation in Melted Glacier National Park?
What are the implications for Montana’s Glacier National Park if the glaciers there are melting? Indeed, the glaciers for which Glacier National Park is named are melting away due to increasing global temperatures in recent decades, attributable most likely to global warming. A century ago, Grinnell Glacier, once the park’s largest, covered almost 440 acres. Today it has shrunk to just one-quarter of that size. Many of the glaciers are gone altogether: According to the Sierra Club, the number of glaciers in the park has dropped from around 150 in 1850 to approximately 35 today. Most of the glacier loss in the park has occurred since the late 1960s, when global warming trends began to intensify. Park scientists are now worried that, if nothing is done to curb global warming, by the year 2030 there may not be a single glacier left in Glacier National Park. Glaciers form when huge ice sheets build up under snow that has slowly accumulated over time. As the snow cover mounts, the intense w
