What will they call Glacier National Park when there are no more glaciers?

It's true.    The glaciers are melting, not just in the Arctic Circle but in Montana, home of the Glacier National Park.

A century ago, there were 150 ice sheets, many of them scores of feet thick, along the park's Montana-Canadian border.   Today there are perhaps 25, according an article by Michael Wines in the New York Times.

There will be multiple results -- and not just tourist vistas and skiing resorts, but water supply to farmers and to cities in the area that depend on melting snow and ice in hot summer months.    The melting is now months ahead of the usual.

This is not just in this one national park.  It's happening all across the North American West.  Wines writes: 

"The retreat is not entirely due to man-made global-warming, though scientists say that plays a major role. While the rate of melting has alternately sped up and slowed in lock step with decades-long climate cycles, it has risen steeply since about 1980.

"And while glaciers came and went millenniums ago, the changes this time are unfolding over a Rocky Mountain landscape of big cities, sprawling farms and growing industry. All depend on steady supplies of water, and in the American West, at least 80 percent of it comes from the mountains.

“'Glaciers are essentially a reservoir of water held back for decades, and they’re releasing that water in August when it’s hot, and streams otherwise might have low flows or no flows,' Daniel B. Fagre, a United States Geological Survey research ecologist, said in an interview. . . .'" 

Dr. Fagre said that the implications for wildlife are almost too great to count.  But: 

"For people, the future is somewhat clearer. . . . Rising temperatures and early snowmelt make for warmer, drier summers as rivers shrink and soils dry out. That is already driving a steady increase in wildfires, including in the park, and disease and pest infestations in forests. . . . 

"Moisture loss from early snowmelt is worsening a record hydrological drought on the Colorado River, which supplies water to about 40 million people from the Rockies to California and Mexico; by 2050, scientists estimate, the Colorado's flow could drop by 10 percent to 30 percent."

And, as dire as this all sounds, a sizable number of Republicans in congress refuse to believe that this is a crisis -- while we careen ever so much closer to the tipping point when it will be too late.

Ralph

PS:   In a letter to the editor of the NYT, someone suggested an answer to what would we call Glacier National Park when there are no more glaciers:    "Glacier Memorial Park."   I like that -- except I'm don't know that we'll need to call it anything;  if the land has become inhabitable, there will be no one to call it anything.