Glacier National Park famously posted signs for years claiming the Glaciers would be gone by 2020. They were close. The signs about the glaciers were gone by 2020, but not the Glaciers.
Glacier sensitivity was an early canary in the Global Warming Coal Mine. AlGore warming promised us these things would disappear and you’ll still get the odd report of some massive calving event as if it was the breaking of the seventh seal.
The big whoops at GLacier National Park inspired them to amend the official website.
You may have heard about Glacier National Park updating some exhibits that referenced research that indicated that the park’s glaciers could be gone by 2020 or 2030. Those exhibits were updated in 2019 to better reflect the latest science.
As part of an FAQ that also asks “when we’ll they be gone.”
Predicting exactly when the glaciers will be gone requires answers to a series of questions. For example, is “gone” defined as inactive or disappeared?
Let me help you. Gone, like the signs that said the Glaciers would be gone. Gone, like that. Or are those just inactive? I’m not a glaciologist nor do I make signs so I may not be qualified to answer but then neither are they. But I’m not getting paid to say either way .
This brings us to one of THE most famous canaries in the Global Warming coal mine, Greenland’s Jakobshavan Glacier. At about the same time Glacier National Parks ‘Glaciers’ will be gone sings got gone NASA reported that the Jakobshavan Glacier had begun growing longer and thicker (for a third straight year).
Jakobshavn’s growth did not come as a surprise to scientists. A recent study team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, determined that water transported to the area around the glacier by a key ocean current has been colder than it was prior to 2016, when the growth began. The colder water is not melting the ice from the front and underneath the glacier as quickly as the warmer water did.
I find it interesting that these not at all surprised scientists were not featured on Cable News shows for years prior warning everyone about the expected growth of the Glacier due to a natural (key) Ocean current. It might have been the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) the amateurs on these pages have mentioned now and again.
No worries. The unsurprised scientists predict that it will flip again (with or without scientists predicting it, by the way) and that this return to melting will cause sea level to rise.
Odd that these same glaciers have been growing and receding, watched or not, without any life-threatening change to sea-level rise until it was connected to the potential for a rising tide of grant dollars or funding for these “scientists.”
Experts who will lose their minds when the AMO flip calves icebergs bigger than Manhattan (which was supposed to be underwater years ago but isn’t).
