Last updated: August 13, 2024
Place
Fire on the Rise
Quick Facts
Location:
Camas Rd, 0.5 miles east of intersection with North Fork Rd
Amenities
4 listed
Audio Description, Parking - Auto, Trailhead, Wheelchair Accessible
What impact do humans have on forest fires? Some forest fires are started naturally, through lightning strikes or the sun. Others are started by humans, intentionally or unintentionally, and the impact is quite obvious. But how does human-caused climate change fit in? This panel considers how different forests might look if not for human-caused climate change.
Hotter and drier conditions have made Glacier an increasingly fiery place, along with most of the American West. Imagine visiting the park to find your favorite view obscured by smoke or whole areas closed for public safety. Imagine struggling to breathe or having to evacuate your campsite in the middle of the night. In recent years, many visitors to Glacier have experienced all of these things. How can park visitors and park managers adapt to this fiery new world?
From 1984 to 2015, about 22 million forest acres burned in the Western United States. Computer models created by scientists, John Abatzoglou from the University of Idaho and A. Park Williams from Columbia University estimated that 11 million of those acres were attributable to human-caused changes in our climate. Because the numbers are cumulative, both of the lines in this graph rise over time. Their work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 and a version of this graph was published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Fourth National Climate Assessment in 2018.
Hotter and drier conditions have made Glacier an increasingly fiery place, along with most of the American West. Imagine visiting the park to find your favorite view obscured by smoke or whole areas closed for public safety. Imagine struggling to breathe or having to evacuate your campsite in the middle of the night. In recent years, many visitors to Glacier have experienced all of these things. How can park visitors and park managers adapt to this fiery new world?
From 1984 to 2015, about 22 million forest acres burned in the Western United States. Computer models created by scientists, John Abatzoglou from the University of Idaho and A. Park Williams from Columbia University estimated that 11 million of those acres were attributable to human-caused changes in our climate. Because the numbers are cumulative, both of the lines in this graph rise over time. Their work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 and a version of this graph was published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Fourth National Climate Assessment in 2018.