🔗 Share this article

Deep in California’s Sierra mountain range, enormous ice formations are vanishing and projected to melt away entirely by the beginning of the coming hundred years, leaving ice-free peaks for the first time in human history, recent studies has found.

Age-Old Origins of Sierra Nevada Ice Masses

The range's glaciers are more ancient than previously known, tracing back many thousands of years, with a few as old as the most recent glacial period, according to a report published last week.

“Our reconstructed ice age record shows that a future glacier-free Sierra Nevada is unprecedented in human history since known settlement of the Americas around twenty thousand years ago,” the study declares.

Global Risk to Glaciers

Glaciers globally are under threat during the climate emergency. A study released in May of this year determined that almost forty percent of ice sheets are doomed to melt because of climate warming. If such heating increases by 2.7C, which the world is currently on track for, as up to seventy-five percent will vanish, causing sea level rise and mass displacement.

Across the Western United States, ice formations have diminished substantially since they were first documented in the 1800s, according to the article.

Focus on Major Glaciers

The recent study centers on several Sierra Nevada glacial masses – the Palisade, Lyell, Maclure and Conness ice sheets – that are some of the largest and likely most ancient in the mountain chain. Their durability amid climate warming makes them “indicators” for studying ice loss in the west, the study notes.

Study Techniques and Findings

Scientists looked at newly uncovered base rock around the glaciers and took samples to determine how long the region was blanketed by ice. They determined that the glaciers have enveloped swaths of the range for far longer than previously known – since prior to people inhabited North America.

The state's glacial sheets reached their peak extents as long ago as thirty thousand years ago, the article’s authors wrote, and a particular of the glaciers experts studied is thought to have expanded 7,000 years ago, earlier than once thought. The disappearance of ice formations, for the first time in recorded history, demonstrates the profound impacts of the climate crisis, a researcher of the investigation said.

Ecological and Symbolic Consequences

“We’ll be the first to witness the glacier-less summits,” said Andrew Jones, the study’s lead author. “This has environmental ramifications for flora and fauna. And it’s a representational decline. Global warming is highly intangible, but these glaciers are tangible. They’re symbolic elements of the Western U.S..”