The Rocky Mountains' Largest Glaciers Are Melting with Little Fanfare

WIND RIVER RANGE, Wyo. — Here at the roof of the Continental Divide, one of the Rocky Mountains' largest glaciers is in retreat.

Wyoming’s Wind River range.

A new world is emerging in the wake of the receding ice. In a vast, glacially carved basin, where towering spires of granite dominate the skyline, a small colony of stunted Engelmann spruce has taken up residence in a pile of rocky debris, some 500 feet above the tree line. Bees flit among the yellow mountain asters dotting the boulder field at the glacier's base. Grass grows along a stream where there was, until recently, only snow and ice.

“It's a different place today,” Darran Wells, an outdoor education professor at Central Wyoming College, observed from a research camp near the base of the Dinwoody Glacier on a recent evening. A regular visitor to the glacier over the last two decades, Wells offered a succinct take on its evolution over his nightly meal, a dehydrated serving of shepard's potato stew with beef.

Read the Scientific American story - “The Rocky Mountains' Largest Glaciers Are Melting with Little Fanfare.”