Wheeler Peak Glacier In Nevada Gone (Personal Note - I Walked On It 4 Years Ago)
Ed. - A small glacier, certainly, and the cirque it occupied was more rock than ice/snow, but nonetheless a glacier in Nevada, which was pretty cool. No longer.
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Wheeler Peak Glacier lies above a high-desert grove of bristlecone pines on top of a moraine of granite boulders in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park. On a warm fall afternoon, the glacier bears little resemblance to the mammoth ice structures people typically associated with Antarctica. Rather, piles of loose rock are enveloped by a jagged amphitheater that reaches more than 13,000 feet in the sky.
More than 10,000 years ago, Wheeler Peak Glacier was a textbook glacier, a behemoth of dense ice jammed inside a mountain. Today, that’s no longer the case. Like an old-fashioned cooler, all that’s left of Nevada’s only glacier is an ice block insulated by tons of surrounding rock.
Visitors often associate the “rock glacier” with the snow and ice fields that once filled the area year-round. Ed Janov has trekked to the glacier four times, most recently two months ago. After reaching the summit of the enormous heap, the Las Vegas resident was brisk in his reaction. “It’s gone,” he said.
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Scientists from Ohio State University set up cameras to monitor the glacier, lakes, weather and water flow. The data will create a barometer park officials can use to measure the size and scope of the glacier. Scott Reinemann, who worked on the study, said photos from as recently as 2005 show blankets of snow covering the glacier in summer. Since 2012, gray rock has been the predominant feature in summer. “The biggest thing we’ve noticed in the 10 years we’ve been going there is the amount of snow in July and August,” Reinemann said. “It’s all gone.”
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http://lasvegassun.com/news/2015/nov/23/nevada-does-have-a-glacier-for-now/
