Across the US west, rising temperatures are causing glaciers to retreat to the point of vanishing. About 300 glaciers have disappeared since the 1960s, with almost all of the rest set to drastically shrink as the climate crisis continues to escalate, a new study has found.
At the midpoint of the last century more than 1,450 glaciers – large tongues of ice, snow and rock that move under their own weight and gravity – were threaded throughout the mountains of the American west, providing cool water for ecosystems and agriculture as they gradually melted.
Some, in the Sierra Nevada of California, were formed a few thousand years ago while others, such as those in the Pacific north-west, are remnants from even further back in the last ice age, which ended about 11,700 years ago.
