If you saw our recent blog post about the winners of our Facebook My Travel Adventures photo contest, you will recall the winning photo was entitled “Global Warming,” and showed the melting Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska. Alaska isn’t the only place where you can actually see the dramatic effects of global warming. Many of the glaciers in United States are melting; so many in fact that Glacier National Park in Montana was high on our list of “The 10 Best Travel Destinations in the World (That Are About to Disappear).”
According to experts, at the current rate of ice loss due to global warming, it will
be less than 20 years until the glaciers vanish in Glacier National Park. This phenomenon has been overnight in geological terms, but for tourists it has been escalating over the last century. When the park was created in 1910, Glacier National Park was the site of more than 150 glaciers; today there are only 27 glaciers left. With the change in temperature and the ice melting to water, the ecosystem of the park is likely change, and so will the wildlife.
Today, Glacier National Park is more than one million square acres with 200 waterfalls and 712 lakes (of which only 131 have names). It also plays host to 260 species of birds, 62 species of mammals, and 1,132 cataloged plant species.
However, there is still time to visit Glacier National Park and see why President Taft signed the bill to make it the 10th national park in the country.
