As the debate over global warming heats up, one thing is certain; the world’s glaciers seem to be receding at a record pace. All around the world 2010 has been the hottest year on record, and since we first started keeping track of global temperatures, the first decade of the new millennium has been the warmest ten-year period ever recorded. A full century has now passed since Glacier National Park was first established, and from all indications the relatively small number of glaciers that still occupy this incredibly scenic region of western Montana will all disappear within the next couple of decades. You certainly might imagine that when the park was first established nobody could have possibly conceived of the idea of global warming, but in fact, a full half-century earlier, a distinguished British physicist named John Tyndall had actually predicted that a global greenhouse effect might eventually be instigated through the burning of fossil fuels!
Tyndall was born in Ireland in 1820 and received his early education in local schools. After a stint as a railway engineer and a teacher, he became a member of the British Royal Society and held a professorship of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution, were he eventually rose to the position of superintendent. He earned his doctorate in Germany, and for many years spent almost all of his free time studying the huge glaciers of the Swiss Alps. Some of his more popular publications were ‘The Glaciers of the Alps’ and ‘Mountaineering in 1869’. Although his other published works were of a highly scientific nature, they were all written in a common-sense style that made them appealing to a much wider audience. Tyndall’s books displayed a remarkable clearness of style, as well as an accuracy of scientific thought. His research on the characteristics of radiant heat are probably his greatest contribution to science, though a fair amount of his fame was attained from his practical approach to the subject, and his adept skills as a lecturer.
One of Tyndall’s companions during his many excursions to the Swiss Alps was Thomas Henry Huxley, the grandfather of famed science fiction writer Aldous Huxley. Thomas Huxley wrote the controversial book on evolution entitled ‘Mans Place In Nature,’ which was the first serious investigation into man’s uncanny resemblance to apes. The comparison is one that has been continually, and falsely, attributed to Charles Darwin, although Huxley certainly supported Darwin’s views. Other like-minded scientists of the time included noted evolutionists such as Herbert Spencer and Alfred Russell Wallace. All of these men were free-thinkers who were intensely involved in their various fields of scientific research, and each of them presented a fresh new view of the physical world in an uncompromising and factual manner.
In 1872, Tyndall visited the United States on a lecturing tour where he pointed out the fact that burning coal, oil and gas would release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Tyndall believed that an increase of carbon dioxide would raise the overall temperature of the earth through a greenhouse effect. Needless to say, his new theory was considered controversial at the time. However, in 1956, a controlled experiment conducted at Johns Hopkins University appeared to prove that Tyndall’s theories on greenhouse gasses were actually quite correct. The Year 1957 was known as the International Geophysical Year, and scientists from all around the world worked together to share their knowledge about the physical world. Nearly 10,000 researchers gathered on 60 experimental bases located across Antarctica to study such things as gravity, magnetism, layers of snow and ice, wind, atmospheric pressure, and temperatures. This survey was conducted worldwide and included the study of glaciers as well as ocean currents. On Antarctica, scientists also studied the ice sheet, and tried to calculate how fast it was moving towards the sea.
It has been estimated that almost 90% of the world’s fresh water is locked up in the ice of Antarctica. But Antarctica hasn’t always been the frozen land we imagine it to be. In fact the icy continent was apparently quite warm and green in the past. Petrified wood and fossils of leaves from redwood, beech and pine trees have been found there, as well as huge deposits of coal. Geologists have estimated that the Ice Age came to Antarctica sometime between 11 and 14 million years ago, then, roughly a hundred thousand years ago, the rest of the earth suddenly slipped into a similar pattern. Some scientists believe that huge amounts of volcanic dust or even debris from a large asteroid colliding with the earth may have blocked out the sun’s rays, causing the world to cool off dramatically.
At any rate, the average temperature fell suddenly, and much of what is now North America was soon covered with ice up to a mile thick. Only the very tops of the mountains in the Northern Rockies would have been visible above the icecap. Coastlines around the world extended out beyond their current borders to a depth of between two or three hundred feet below sea level, and nearly a third of the world’s existing landmasses were covered in vast sheets of ice. Giant ice fields and glaciers slowly ground away at the mountains during the height of the Ice Age, gradually carving out the distinctive features of the extreme mountains and valleys we now find throughout Glacier National Park. The mountains had been formed long before the glaciation began, when two huge tectonic plates collided eons ago, forcing an ancient seabed to raise up high above its former elevation at sea level. Then, some time about 11,000 years ago the earth suddenly began to warm up. A few thousand years later the region that makes up Glacier National Park became extremely dry and warm, and it’s possible that there may have been no real glaciers remaining at the park at the time. The glaciers currently found there are actually only small remnants of a mini-ice-age that took place around 4,000 years ago.
More recently a blue-green algae fossil deposit was discovered along a road-cut at a high elevation near Logan Pass. These sea-dwelling algae are believed to have been the most abundant and advanced organisms living on earth about a billion years ago, when the world was entirely covered with water. The simple life forms, known in their fossilized state as stromatolites, weathered the harsh conditions on earth by turning carbon dioxide, which originally made up most of the planet’s atmosphere, into oxygen. As a result, this primeval ooze eventually provided the conditions that gave all other air-breathing life-forms the chance to slowly develop and evolve. During photosynthesis the algae create a crusty layer of calcium carbonate, and these continuous deposits are what make up the stromatolites in Glacier National Park, which are not true fossils at all, but are merely a metabolic byproduct of the blue-green algae’s life cycle.
Living stromatolites still exist in a few places on earth today, most notably in a secluded bay in western Australia, where conditions continue to mimic the Precambrian seas of old. Wouldn’t it be ironic if after a billion years of evolving life on earth, the constant burning of fossil fuels by humans, presumably the most highly evolved creature to ever inhabit the planet, eventually replaced the earth’s life-sustaining supply of oxygen with carbon dioxide once again? Our own stubborn reliance on cheap gas and coal could actually lead to the flooding of the planet from melting ice caps and vanishing glaciers, and in some nightmarish succession of catastrophic events, I suppose there’s also a slight chance that nothing other than blue-green algae might be left in the end to represent life on Earth. Somehow I doubt that even the fertile mind of Aldous Huxley, with his haunting vision of A Brave New World, could have ever seen that one coming!
When the region that now encompasses Glacier National Park was explored by Euro-Americans in the 1850’s, it was estimated that there were upwards of 150 active glaciers in the area. Just a mere century later the count had dropped considerably, to about 50 glaciers, and today the number is less than half that! In fact, just sixty years ago the glaciers were expected to fully disappear within the next thousand years, if weather patterns continued to follow their supposed course. Unfortunately, time seems to be running out more quickly for these icy remnants of the past, but perhaps there is still hope yet. In a worldwide effort to understand global warming, we may be nearing a turning point, and although opinions continue to differ as to the cause of radical climate change, modern technologies and advances in renewable energy sources such as wind and solar have given us a chance to drastically alter our human behavior. If we can do something now to reduce the affect of global warming, then by all means, let’s do it. After all, there’s really nothing much to lose, other than the shining vision of the very glaciers that for a full century have furnished a spectacular theme for Montana’s premier National Park.
