GLACIERS MELTING IN MONTANA PARK

[Anonymous]

Glaciers Melting in Montana Park
(March
06) — A panel meeting in France this week plans to discuss concerns
that human-caused warming of the climate is why the glaciers in Glacier
National Park are melting.
CBS News correspondent Stephan
Kaufman reports one proposal to be discussed at the World Heritage and
Climate Change meeting in Paris this week is a plan to designate
Montana’s Glacier National Park as a “world heritage site in danger”
due to global warming.
A dozen organizations last month filed a
petition asking the United Nations to declare Glacier in Montana and
the adjacent Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada endangered, because
of glacial retreat and its effect on the environment of the parks.
Together they are known as Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park,
and are covered by a 1995 treaty as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Dr.
Daniel Fagre, a federal research scientist based at Glacier National
Park in Montana, says that in 1850, the park had 150 glaciers. Today,
because of global warming, there are only 27 left, with estimates that
all the glaciers in the park will be gone by the year 2030.
“The
glaciers respond [to global warming] by having less snow in the winter
and then they start melting earlier in the spring,” he explains. “The
summers, of course, are always a period when they melt but these are
now longer.”
The glacier situation is unlikely to improve anytime soon, says Fagre.
“It
would take a pretty substantial climate change to bring our glaciers
back. We would have to get a lot of moisture and it would have to get
cooler,” says Fagre. “So I don’t think that we’ll see much of a change
in the next few decades.”
“The trees are responding, the soil
carbon, the streams, all of these are responding [to the climate
change], but it’s harder to measure those and hard to see them than it
is the glaciers,” says Fagre.
Glaciers, he says, are important “in
nurturing some our streams in late summer and there’re a lot of aquatic
organisms that live in those streams, so we’ll be using this as an
instructive example and studying it so we understand how eco-systems in
general respond to climate change.”
The mean summer temperature at
Glacier Park has risen by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit over the past
century, according to the USGS.
Declaring Waterton-Glacier in danger
would require the World Heritage Committee to identify ways of
mitigating effects of climate change, said Erica Thorson, an Oregon law
professor who wrote the petition.
Also up for discussion at this
week’s meeting at the headquarters of the U.N. Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization are reports of environmental degradation at
Nepal’s Sagarmatha National Park, which includes Mount Everest;
Huarascan National Park in Peru; Great Barrier Reef in Australia; and
the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve System in Central America.

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March 15, 2006 at 11:38 AM