Global warming is altering the identity of national parks in the West, especially the Pacific Northwest, where the iconic string of glacier-capped mountains inexorably shrinks from the horizon, park officials warn.
The melting ice caps in Washington state, home to more glaciers than anywhere else in the lower 48, are providing one of the most visual accountings of global warming outside Alaska and the Arctic region, enhanced by federal officials' digital archiving last year of photos of park glaciers taken 50 years ago.
The changes over the decades are threatening the aesthetics and ecosystems of parks such as North Cascades, imperiling the country's natural heritage, park officials and conservationists said. Glacier National Park in Montana has lost 124 of its 150 glaciers in the last 150 years and is projected to have none left by about 2030, according to park officials.
"It's awful. We've got to change our ways," said Steve Shuster, 55, an architectural designer from Seattle and a regular North Cascades visitor.
Another passerby enjoying the 360-degree panorama of white-capped summits, Sherry Cline, 75, agreed. "If they're all bare peaks up there, what's it going to be?" said the retired high school biology teacher from Lynden, Wash.
President Bush, criticized by some as dragging his feet on climate change, last month proposed an international gathering to address carbon emissions. At the same time, the Interior Department announced a new climate change task force to look at national parks and other agencies. Conservationist groups have long warned that many parks are facing damage from greenhouse gases.
'Finally starting to get it'
As last week's G-8 summit put Earth's rising temperature on an international stage, park enthusiasts and their supporters said they were heartened to see the Bush administration say it was taking the issue seriously.
"They're finally starting to get it," said Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), who attended a recent gathering of the state's three national park superintendents and others at Seattle's Mountaineers club, where discussion focused on repairing parks after last fall's flooding.
Not everyone agrees that mankind's emissions are causing warming. Some scientists in Washington and elsewhere contend that natural cooling and heating cycles are at work.
In North Cascades and Mt. Rainier National Parks, both in Washington state, six glaciers under study have shrunk by 45 percent in the past 100 years, a park geologist said. The 312 glaciers in North Cascades park, spanning 42 square miles, account for a quarter of all glaciers in the lower 48 states, park officials said. The Natural Resources Defense Council, a conservation group, has identified 12 national parks in the West, including North Cascades and Mt. Rainier, as most at risk from climate change, and seven face loss of snowfields and glaciers.
"Olympic, Mt. Rainier, North Cascades and Glacier [National Parks] -- you can look at a large geographic region using the parks as the sampling points of the impacts of global climate change," said North Cascades Supt. Chip Jenkins.
Emerging from the icy losses has been pristine land not seen or touched by humans for centuries, as well as new lakes, park officials said. Still, the big thaw is troublesome because the runoff may cause powerful, destructive flooding and could deprive high-altitude animals and organisms of cool water in the summer, park officials said.
No one is saying Washington's vistas of glaciers, including the magnificent Mt. Rainier on Seattle's skyline, will vanish soon, not even in 100 years.
But the issue remains a cause of concern and controversy.
Don Easterbrook, professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University, who has studied climate change for 40 years, agrees that glaciers are shrinking but says there's a good chance it's a result of solar changes, not carbon emissions.
Easterbrook also noted that the trend analysis of the past 100 years begins with a cool period in which glaciers would naturally be advancing and ends with a relatively warm 30-year period in which glaciers inevitably would shrink.
"In a nutshell, what it looks like is there's a strong possibility that what we're seeing is climate change due to solar output," Easterbrook said.
Snowpack melt controversy
Meanwhile, Philip Mote with the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington said a study of 11 states west of the Rockies shows that snowpack has shrunk by 10 percent to 15 percent from the 1950s to 2000. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, found earlier springtime snow melts and lower summer river flows in the same 11 states from 1948 to 2002.
The snowpack melt became controversial when Washington state's associate climatologist, Mark Albright, disputed Mote's findings and referred to them as "the myth of the vanishing snowpack caused by global warming" in the Portland Oregonian in February. Albright was stripped of his state title, an unpaid post, and remains a research meteorologist at the University of Washington, said Mote, who also is state climatologist and was Albright's boss.
The slow disappearance of glaciers and snowpack would fundamentally alter the attraction of such parks as North Cascades, where "with little effort, you feel like you're the only person for hundreds of miles," said ranger Charles Beall.
For the past 25 years here, geologist Jon Riedel, 48, has been studying glaciers, which he considers "dramatic indicators" of climate change.
A native of Marshfield, Wis., he became fascinated with how ancient glaciers altered the Wisconsin landscape and then landed his dream job in this national park where he could actually encounter them. "I don't have to imagine," he said.
The thaw holds serious economic implications for the Northwest, Riedel added.
Natural melting typically yields 250 billion gallons of fresh water every year -- for comparison purposes, the Chicago area draws 767 billion gallons a year from Lake Michigan -- which feeds the Skagit and Columbia Rivers and in turn helps produce the state's renowned cheap electricity. The waters also aid recovery efforts for endangered fish and provide irrigation for winter wheat fields and fruit orchards.
Glacier loss eventually would mean smaller waterways, Riedel said.
"The landscapes will remain after the glaciers are gone, but it's not the same, is it?" he said.Chicago Tribune
