What’s harder to connect with is what this all means for people in temperate places. While these dispatches from the far-off polar extremes of the Earth may feel removed from our reality, understanding our relationship to these colossal frozen giants is crucial for our own climate awakening. Learning about glacier vulnerability can guide our fight to stop climate change and illuminate ways to change course before it’s too late.

The glaciers around today are leftovers from Earth’s last ice age, which came to an end 12,000 years ago. During that time, all of Canada and a good swath of the northern U.S. was completely covered in ice. New York, at the peak of the last ice age, had a vertical mile of ice towering above its surface. Today, only a small fraction of that ice remains, with glaciers covering about 10 percent of Earth’s land surface. Still, they remain critical players in stabilizing Earth’s climate and ecosystems. Glaciers are white, which helps reflect solar heat back into space, and they are cold—two attributes that help cool our planet. But their most important gift to us might be fresh water. 98 percent of Earth’s water is in the oceans, salty and unusable for our daily needs. A whopping three-fourths of the miniscule amount of fresh water we have on the planet—the water we really need—is stored in Earth’s 200,000-plus glaciers. What’s more, new fresh-water-containing snow that falls on a glacier, thanks to the glacier’s cool microclimate, can survive all year long, providing continual fresh water downstream, while snow that falls elsewhere melts off in the spring and is quickly consumed by the ecosystem. You can think of a glacier as a water faucet, left slightly open for us, enabling us to enjoy water all year long.

Glacier melt is nothing new. In fact, we go in and out of ice ages every 100,000 years or so, as fluctuations in the shape and tilt of Earth’s orbit around the sun position some portions of the Earth farther from the sun, making them colder, and shift other parts of the Earth closer to the sun, warming them up. Water that is sucked out of the oceans through evaporation is converted into snow, which falls on colder regions of the planet and remains frozen as long as cold conditions persist. If the cold climate remains long enough, you get large glaciers—and an ice age that can last 80,000 years. All of this ice-making takes a lot of water out of the ocean, and sea levels fall as a consequence. Then orbital conditions shift again, the ice melts, and glaciers send colossal amounts of water back into the oceans, flooding coastal lands anew. You can see evidence of this cycle in downtown Miami’s financial district, where exposed coral remnants 15 feet above current ground level provide proof that the area once lay at the bottom of the sea, at a prior historical moment of the Earth when glaciers melted much more than they have now—an ominous announcement to us of what is yet to come.

While this pattern happens naturally every 100,000 years, human activity is accelerating glacier melt so fast that glacier collapse—a process that should have had thousands of years left to play out—is occurring in mere decades, or even faster. Much of the damage we’ve already caused will be irreversible for millennia. Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier recently began to crumble, and pieces of it are now floating in the ocean and rapidly melting. Its demise could trigger further destabilization of surrounding glaciers, and raise ocean levels around the world by several meters.

Today, glaciers cover a surface area of roughly 5.8 million square miles. That’s larger than the United States, at 3.8 million square miles. If all that ice were a single country, “Glacierland,” it would be the Earth’s second largest, behind only Russia at 6.6 million square miles. While the biggest glaciers are mostly found in the polar regions or in Greenland, a significant number remain closer to home, in high-altitude environments like the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada in California, Nepal, the Central Andes, the Tian Shan mountains of Asia, and the European Alps. There are even glaciers in Africa, on the equator, and in the South Pacific. There is still plenty of water left to melt in climate-vulnerable glaciers. And the rapid sea level rise they’re causing could result in massive floods over millions of acres of coastal lands, displacing hundreds of millions of people in the coming century. If all remaining glacier ice melts the sea would rise by about 230 feet!

But sea level rise is not the only impact of melting glaciers. Rapid glacier melt creates a feedback loop. As glaciers warm, the climate impact on Earth is magnified, building on itself, accelerating warming and speeding deglaciation. That’s because when white glaciers melt, Earth’s darker surfaces (on land and in oceans) absorb solar heat instead of reflecting it back to space—think of the effect of wearing a dark shirt on a very hot day, but on a planetary scale. This, in turn, makes the glaciers melt even more, and the Earth warm even faster.

Paradoxically, the pace that glaciers are melting at is also reducing our global supply of fresh water. As glaciers shrink, the dependable fresh water they provide for ecosystems, for farming, for industry, and for home use dwindles, too. Smaller glaciers mean there is less ice to melt each year. Melting glaciers, especially those perched on mountains, also pose another kind of danger when they lose their physical integrity. Ice structures weaken when they warm, fracturing and collapsing and rushing down mountainsides, carrying with them rocks and debris that can take out everything in their path. I call these “glacier tsunamis,” and they are becoming more prevalent in places like the Himalayas and the Central Andes, where thousands of people have died in massive land and ice slides in recent years.

Melting glaciers create havoc with the weather, too. Have you ever noticed that most of Europe is at the same latitude as Canada, and yet is not nearly as cold in the winter? It’s because currents in the ocean and the atmosphere move warm water and air from Earth’s equatorial regions through the Arctic and Antarctic, where the air and water cool off before returning to the equator (like an oceanic and atmospheric conveyor belt/AC system). The ocean has a natural churning and circulation effect that is in perfect balance to keep global temperatures stable. If glaciers melt and drop too much fresh water into the salty seas, oceanic water circulation and air currents can stall, leaving cold water and cold air in the polar regions and warm water and warm air near the equator. This breakdown of the ocean’s “conveyer belt,” so to speak, could be tragic for local climate systems all over the planet, sending the tropics into extreme heat and regions like Europe into a deep freeze.

My work exploring the ways glaciers influence our ecosystem has shown me just how significantly these rapidly diminishing sheets of ice impact all of our lives. But it has also made me realize that we shouldn’t resign ourselves to this future. It isn’t too late to slow, stop, and even reverse climate change. We can save glaciers, and avoid a deepening of the climate emergency. I recently returned from the global climate summit in Glasgow, where 108 global leaders pledged to collaborate to reduce methane gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Given that methane is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, this is a big step to slow warming, save glaciers, and restore our climate.

The COVID lockdown also showed us that we are capable of limiting our use of carbon and other so-called “super pollutants” that are even worse for climate than CO₂, like methane, black carbon, dirty refrigerants, and smog. While before the pandemic, the idea that we’d stop everything to save our climate would have been unthinkable, we in fact did stop everything to tackle COVID. With driving, air travel, and industry at rest, for example, we removed black carbon emissions from the atmosphere. Black carbon, or soot as it is more commonly known, causes severe respiratory disease in humans and is also a scourge on the environment, darkening glaciers and accelerating ice melt. With skies suddenly cleared of this pollutant during COVID, some residents of Nepal and India, who had lived lifetimes under a cloud of smog, saw the snowcapped Himalayas for the first time.

The positive effects of COVID on our environment and on the climate emergency were temporary—and as COVID restrictions eased, we went back to business as usual and the benefits vanished as quickly as they had materialized. Nonetheless, the temporary spike in climate health proved that collective action to give nature a break and to repair our climate is possible. We are all vested players in our global climate and each of us has the individual power, and choice, to make good climate decisions which can have huge collective benefits.

We simply have to realize how urgent our climate emergency really is.

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Ever since, the Park Service has guarded some of the planet’s most spectacular scenery, leaving it, at least seemingly, unimpaired. To be sure, park officials invited guests in as they promoted “the enjoyment of future generations,” but human enterprise was meant to be confined to the hotels, visitor centers, and roads that dominated small portions of parks—the very places where, today, crowded park gift shops overflow with stuffed animals, and gas-guzzling RVs, SUVs, and minivans circle crowded parking lots. Beyond the traffic and tourist zones, parks have become critical nurseries for threatened biodiversity, as well as repositories for a uniquely American sense of national identity that is invariably expressed by photos of vast, empty vistas with grizzlies scattered in the foreground, hawks hovering skyward, and mountain crags holding the rest of the world at bay.

In this telling of the tale, America’s national parks remain wild and untouched. But that story is too simple. Parks always have been imperfect vehicles for noble protectionism—and few places demonstrate this as well as the Rocky Mountain region of northwestern Montana known today as Glacier National Park. This special place has glaciers, of course, and also rugged peaks, hundreds of lakes, and almost 3,000 miles of streams; it spans more than a million acres and straddles the Continental Divide. For many Americans, Glacier has long represented a wilderness frontier where unadulterated nature reigns.

But, in fact, human history and culture permeate Glacier, a place shaped by Native Americans’ dependence on the land, conservationists’ efforts to enshrine its beauty, and corporate America’s exploitation of its treasures. The Blackfeet have for centuries called it the “Backbone of the World,” the source of spiritual power and life forces that animate indigenous life and tradition. The American conservationist George Bird Grinnell dubbed it the “Crown of the Continent” and considered it an ideal place to preserve for national identity and culture. Louis Hill, the president of the Great Northern Railway, sold it as “everybody’s Park,” a symbolic place where Americans might encounter the source of the nation’s greatness. In broad outlines, Glacier’s unnatural natural history is shared by many of the nation’s beloved wilderness parks.

In large part, Glacier owed its establishment to Grinnell, a scientist, writer, and conservationist from New York who first visited northwestern Montana in 1885. Grinnell knew magnificent scenery—he had explored Yellowstone National Park with the U.S. Army in 1875—but Montana’s Rockies awed him. Launching from the state’s St. Mary country, he climbed into the mountains, hunted bighorn sheep and fished trout, met a party of Kootenais traveling from their homeland west of the divide, saw glaciers (including what is now known as Grinnell Glacier), and basked in the colorful “artist’s palette” of the wilderness.

In his writings, Grinnell ignored plain evidence of the human impacts that had been wrought there by native peoples, choosing instead to wax poetic about nature, and nature alone. As the historian Mark David Spence revealed in his book Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, Grinnell relied on Blackfeet guides to accompany him over ridges and along Indian trails, but in his journal, he wrote of these places as “absolutely virgin ground … with no sign of previous passage.” A short time later, Grinnell wrote about the native hunting camps in the area. That Grinnell could both describe and share in indigenous presence and not acknowledge its role in shaping the land represented cognitive dissonance of a high order. His rhetorical erasure of obvious human impact became a model for how Americans thought of national parks: unpeopled, untouched—in short, pure nature.

Newspaper ad from a St. Paul, Minnesota newspaper, 1909. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Grinnell wanted to create a nature reserve to protect the eastern flank of the Rockies. Doing so, however, would require wresting the land from the Blackfeet. During a trip in 1891, he hit upon a way to smooth the process: get the U.S. government to obtain the land in a would-be bid for its natural resources. At the time, many prospectors were clambering through the mountains, hoping to find rich mineral deposits. Grinnell, who did not believe such riches would materialize, saw these men as a threat to his park vision. U.S. government officials, too, were suspicious of the miners, whose disorderly behavior posed a threat to tenuous peace on the Blackfeet Reservation.

On behalf of the federal government, which wanted to stay involved to keep prospectors in check, Grinnell helped negotiate the cession of Blackfeet lands to open some 800,000 acres to prospecting. In short, but tense, negotiations in September 1895, the Blackfeet got the government to raise its payment for the cession to $1.5 million and ensured that tribal members could continue cutting timber, hunting, and fishing in the ceded area while it remained public land. Selling the land without maintaining access to such resources would have been unthinkable for tribal leaders, according to historian Louis Warren in The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America. Bison were nearly extinct, and the Blackfeet had been losing territory to the United States for decades. They relied on what this coveted bit of land provided them, spiritually and materially.

Within two years of completing the negotiations, the land became part of the Lewis and Clark Forest Reserve; by 1902, as Grinnell had predicted, the hoped-for mineral boom busted, and the miners had cleared out. With new boundaries etched on the map, the mountains’ glaciers and streams now were wrapped in a federal mantle, not a tribal one, and soon nature lovers began debating and restricting the Blackfeet’s rights to continue cutting timber and taking animals from the reserve. Disagreements continued for decades, intensifying once Congress fulfilled Grinnell’s long-held dream and made Glacier a national park in 1910. Again, the United States ignored the centrality of human activity on the lands.

The cognitive dissonance would only amplify as time went on—thanks, this time around, to the efforts of the Great Northern Railway to popularize the park. When completed in 1893, the Great Northern line connected St. Paul, Minnesota, to Seattle, Washington. Louis Hill, the railroad’s president, knew and adored the northern Rockies, much like Grinnell. He believed they could serve as a salve for multiplying social problems in America. Like many white men of wealth, Hill, who lived in St. Paul, thought early 20th-century society had become over-civilized, with too many meaningless tasks filling time, and he searched for a more authentic life. Wilderness symbolized authenticity, because nature, by its essential definition, was the antithesis of the artificial. He joined Grinnell in lobbying Congress to create Glacier National Park.

Portrait of George Bird Grinnell. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Hill’s motives weren’t entirely lofty. Glacier National Park’s backcountry trails, glacier-fed streams, and dominating peaks made it ideal for well-heeled tourists who wanted to be rejuvenated by wild mountain air and water—and the Great Northern, which traveled through miles and miles of undeveloped land, was ready and able to provide a way for nature seekers to get there. Glacier National Park made for a perfect marketing opportunity. According to historian Marguerite Shaffer, Hill adopted what had been a regional tourist slogan and nationalized it, plastering “See America First” on promotional material all across the nation.

Hill made certain that well-heeled tourists were comfortable amid a raw wilderness landscape. Visitors might hike or fish, but they rarely ventured far from the Great Northern’s orbit of influence. The newly built Glacier Park Hotel and Many Glacier Hotel offered first-class accommodations with rustic touches, including giant logs commanding the so-called Forest Lobby. Hotels blended local materials with cosmopolitan touches, including a Japanese couple serving tea—a not-so-subtle nod to the railway’s Oriental Limited line and its steamship company with commercial interests throughout the Pacific Rim. Chalets modeled on Alpine designs provided relative comfort (slightly) further away from the rail lines and lakefront lodgings. Blackfeet imagery and artifacts were ubiquitous. A teepee village on the hotel lawn offered families four beds and an authentic Western outdoors experience for $0.50 a night.

Hill regularly invited writers and artists into Glacier, generating good copy for the park and for his corporation, a practice that continued even after he retired. Many visitors, predictably, framed the park as an idyll. Writer and educator Margaret Thompson ended her 1936 book High Trails of Glacier National Park with a typical sentiment. “No other temple of worship has the power to bring one more truly into harmony with the sublime,” she wrote. We can recognize this rhetoric of nature today in the suggestion that Glacier—and perhaps all national parks—assert consensus amid seas of consternation, and that true wilderness rises above the fray of human activity and ambition.

Today, Glacier National Park faces many threats, not least among them climate change, which is shrinking the region’s namesake ice sheets. Ten of the park’s 39 named glaciers have shrunk by more than half in the last 50 years. Some scientists predict that Glacier National Park will be glacier-free by the time a child conceived today is eligible to drive a car. Tourists, hoping to see the glaciers before they’re gone, flock to the park, consuming fossil fuels that accelerate the warming that melts the glaciers away. As always, when tourists go to consume nature, they see a side of culture with their main dish.

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