[Halbraun]

Will the glaciers be gone by 2020?
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.

In 2003, researchers published an academic paper about two of the park's glaciers in the Journal of BioScience. They used a geospatial computer model to predict the advance or retreat of Blackfoot Glacier and Jackson Glacier for each decade from 1990 to 2100 based on melting rates from historical data. Since Blackfoot and Jackson are relatively large glaciers, many people hypothesized that if those two glaciers were completely melted then all the other glaciers in the park likely would be as well. A few years later the researchers looked again at how fast Blackfoot and Jackson were shrinking and found that they seemed to be melting faster than they first predicted. Informally, the researchers moved their 2030 date up to 2020. These predictive dates spread widely and were featured on various exhibits around the park. Since then, the exhibits have been updated to reflect more recent research.

Though the park's glaciers are all getting smaller, variations in snow avalanches, ice flow dynamics, and ice thickness cause some glaciers to shrink faster than others. Sometimes a glacier will retreat very quickly where it was thinly and widely spread, only to shrink much more slowly when only the shaded, high elevation ice remains.