The Sad Future Of Yellowstone National Park

[+ WilliamM]

Your Children’s Yellowstone Will Be Radically Different

 

Written by Marguerite Holloway. Photographs and time-lapse video by Josh Haner.

 

NOV. 15, 2018

 

 

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — On a recent fall afternoon in the Lamar Valley, visitors watched a wolf pack lope along a thinly forested riverbank, ten or so black and gray figures shadowy against the snow. A little further along the road, a herd of bison swung their great heads as they rooted for food in the sagebrush steppe, their deep rumbles clear in the quiet, cold air.

 

In the United States, Yellowstone National Park is the only place bison and wolves can be seen in great numbers. Because of the park, these animals survive. Yellowstone was crucial to bringing back bison, reintroducing gray wolves, and restoring trumpeter swans, elk, and grizzly bears — all five species driven toward extinction found refuge here.

 

 

 

But the Yellowstone of charismatic megafauna and of stunning geysers that four million visitors a year travel to see is changing before the eyes of those who know it best. Researchers who have spent years studying, managing, and exploring its roughly 3,400 square miles say that soon the landscape may look dramatically different.

 

Over the next few decades of climate change, the country’s first national park will quite likely see increased fire, less forest, expanding grasslands, shallower, warmer waterways, and more invasive plants — all of which may alter how, and how many, animals move through the landscape. Ecosystems are always in flux, but climate change is transforming habitats so quickly that many plants and animals may not be able to adapt well or at all.

 

 

 

 

 

At the northeast entrance, for example, about 60 fewer days fall below freezing than did 30 years ago.

The snow that blankets the park each winter is a vital part of the Yellowstone ecosystem.

But the snow often doesn’t stay as long, or accumulate the way it used to.

 

By mid-century, scientists predict that the snowpack in some areas of the park will decrease sharply.

Colors show projected decrease in snowpack compared to current averages.

Inches of water trapped as snow

 

 

 

Because snow is a cornerstone of the park’s ecology, the decline is alarming to some ecologists.

 

 

Summers in the park have become warmer, drier and increasingly prone to fire. Even if rainfall increases in the future, it will evaporate more quickly, said Michael Tercek, an ecologist who has worked in Yellowstone for 28 years.

“By the time my daughter is an old woman, the climate will be as different for her as the last ice age seems to us,” Dr. Tercek said.

 

Yellowstone’s unusual landscape — of snow and steam, of cold streams and hot springs — is volcanic. Magma gives rise to boiling water and multihued thermophiles, bacteria that thrive at high temperatures.

 

 

 

 

For many visitors, Yellowstone represents American wilderness: a place with big, open skies where antelope and bison still roam.

 

“You run into visitors and they thank you for the place,” said Ann Rodman, a park scientist. “They are seeing elk and antelope for the first time in their lives.”

 

 

Ms. Rodman, who has been working in Yellowstone for 30 years, has pored over temperature and weather data. The trends surprised her, as well as the urgency.

 

“When I first started doing it, I really thought climate change was something that was going to happen to us in the future,” she said. “But it is one of those things where the more you study it, the more you realize how much is changing and how fast.”

 

“Then you begin to go through this stage, I don’t know if it is like the stages of grief,” Ms. Rodman said. “All of a sudden it hits you that this is a really, really big deal and we aren’t really talking about it and we aren’t really thinking about it.”

 

 

Ms. Rodman has seen vast changes near the town of Gardiner, Mont., at the north entrance to Yellowstone. Some non-nutritious invasive plants like cheatgrass and desert madwort have replaced nutritious native plants. Those changes worry Ms. Rodman and others: Give invasives an inch and they take miles.

 

Cheatgrass has already spread into the Lamar Valley. “This is what we don’t want — to turn into what it looks like in Gardiner,” Ms. Rodman said. “The seeds come in on people’s cars and on people’s boots.”

 

 

 

If cheatgrass and its ilk spread, bison and elk could be affected. Cheatgrass, for instance, grows quickly in the spring. “It can suck the moisture out of the ground early,” Ms. Rodman said. “Then it is gone, so it doesn’t sustain animals throughout the summer the way native grasses would.”

 

In recent years, elk have lost forage when drier, hotter summers have shortened what ecologists call the green wave, in which plants become green at different times at different elevations, said Andrew J. Hansen of Montana State University.

 

 

 

Some elk now stay in valleys outside the park, nibbling lawns and alfalfa fields, Dr. Hansen said. And where they go, wolves follow. “It is a very interesting mix of land-use change and climate change, possibly leading to quite dramatic shifts in migration and to thousands of elk on private land,” he said.

 

Drier summers also mean that fires are a greater threat. The conditions that gave rise to the fires of 1988, when a third of the park burned, could become common.

 

By the end of the century, “the weather like the summer of ’88 will likely be there all the time rather than being the very rare exception,” said Monica G. Turner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “As the climate is warming, we are getting fires that are happening more often. We are starting to have the young forests burn again before they have had a chance to recover.”

 

 

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In 2016, a wildfire swept through trees in a section near the Madison River that had burned in 1988. Because young trees don’t have many cones on them, Dr. Turner said, they don’t have as many seeds to release to form new forest. The cones they do have are close to the ground, which means they are less likely to survive the heat.

 

Repeated fires could lead to more grassland. “The structure of the forests is going to change,” Dr. Turner said. “They might become sparse or not recover if we keep doing a double and triple whammy.”

 

 

 

 

In 2016, the Yellowstone River — famous for its fly fishing and its cutthroat trout, which thrive in colder waters — was closed to anglers for 183 miles downstream from the park after an outbreak of kidney disease killed thousands of fish. “The feeling was that this was a canary in the coal mine,” said Dan Vermillion of Sweetwater Travel Company, a fly-fishing operation in Livingston, Mont.

 

Lower flows and warmer water are one consequence of spring arriving earlier. Quickly melting snow unleashing torrents is another. Flooding has affected the nesting of water birds like common loons, American white pelicans, and double-crested cormorants. “All their nesting is on lakes and ponds, and water levels are fluctuating wildly, as it does with climate change,” said Douglas W. Smith, a park biologist.

 

 

And Yellowstone’s trumpeter swans are declining. By the early 20th century, hunters had wiped out most of the enormous birds in the continental United States, killing them for food and fashionable feathers. But 70 or so swans remained in the Yellowstone region, some of them safe inside the park. Those birds helped restore trumpeters nationwide. Now only two trumpeter pairs live in the park, and they have not bred successfully for several years.

 

Part of the reason, said Dr. Smith and a colleague, Lauren E. Walker, may be the loss of nests and nesting sites during spring floods. A pair on Swan Lake, just south of Mammoth Hot Springs, has spurned the floating nest that the Park Service installed to help the birds.

 

 

 

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“Heritage-wise this is a really important population,” Dr. Walker said. “If this is no longer a reliable spot, what does that mean for the places that may have more human disturbance?”

 

On the shores of Yellowstone Lake, dozens of late-season visitors watched two grizzly bears eating a carcass, while a coyote and some ravens circled, just a hundred or so yards from the road. “If they run this way,” the ranger called out, “get in your cars.”

 

Grizzlies are omnivores, eating whatever is available, including the fat- and protein-packed nuts of the whitebark pine. That pine is perhaps the species most visibly affected by climate change in Yellowstone and throughout the West. Warmer temperatures have allowed a native pest, the mountain pine beetle, to better survive winter, move into high elevations and have a longer reproductive season. In the last 30 years, an estimated 80 percent of the whitebark pines in the park have died by fire, beetle, or fungal infection.

 

 

A grizzly bear in Yellowstone.

 

 

When pine nuts are not plentiful, bears consume other foods, including the elk or deer innards left by hunters outside the park. And that can bring the Yellowstone-area grizzlies, relisted as endangered this September, into conflict with people.

 

 

Yellowstone provides a refuge for people seeking and delighting in a sense of wilderness. It offers a landscape unlike any other: a largely intact ecosystem rich in wildlife and rich in geothermal features. Yellowstone’s unusual beauty was forged by volcanic heat; heat from humanity could be its undoing.

[+ WilliamM]

My brother, Rick, lives close to the north east entrance in Silver Gate, Montana. He has kept track of the all the wolf packs since wolves were returned to Yellowstone during the Clinton Administration. At age 69, he still rises very early in morning, that is when the wolves are most visible.

Edited November 15, 2018 by WilliamM

[cany10011]

I’m a big fan of the National Park system Whenever i travel to one, i only hear foreign speakers, not many Americans. Mostly Europeans and Asians.

[+ Avalon]

Visited it as a boy with my parents. Also the Little Big Horn.

[+ WilliamM]

I’m a big fan of the National Park system Whenever i travel to one, i only hear foreign speakers, not many Americans. Mostly Europeans and Asians.

 

It is not alwsays true of Yellowstone. I hear mostly English speakers, and some have traveled from the East coast, or the South.

[+ Pensant]

It is not alwsays true of Yellowstone. I hear mostly English speakers, and some have traveled from the East coast, or the South.

Sadly, a large percentage of Americans can barely walk 100 meters without wheezing, and others would rather be “social media” shut-ins.

 

National and state parks, bike trails (suburban Philadelphia has the exquisite Perkiomen Trail and Schuykill River Trail, for example) are publicly-funded amenities that less that 5% of people use, or are even aware of. I can bike 50 miles on them and rarely see more than 50 people.

[+ WilliamM]

Sadly, a large percentage of Americans can barely walk 100 meters without wheezing, and others would rather be “social media” shut-ins.

 

National and state parks, bike trails (suburban Philadelphia has the exquisite Perkiomen Trail and Schuykill River Trail, for example) are publicly-funded amenities that less that 5% of people use, or are even aware of. I can bike 50 miles on them and rarely see more than 50 people.

 

I drive to Valley Forge and use all the bike paths there (bring the bike in my car). I jogged and ran over the years. @Pensant, My goal was never to bike long distances.

[+ Pensant]

I drive to Valley Forge and use all the bike paths there (bring the bike in my car). I jogged and ran over the years. @Pensant, My goal was never to bike long distances.

I was born on the Main Line, but haven’t lived in PA since I was 22, when I decamped to the West. I have family there, and I love visiting. People are often surprised to discover how lovely the hinterland is (the PA side, of course). Chadd’s Ford, the Main Line, upper Bucks and Montgomery counties, Bryn Athyn and even out into Lancaster and Adams county.

[cany10011]

I was born on the Main Line, but haven’t lived in PA since I was 22, when I decamped to the West. I have family there, and I love visiting. People are often surprised to discover how lovely the hinterland is (the PA side, of course). Chadd’s Ford, the Main Line, upper Bucks and Montgomery counties, Bryn Athyn and even out into Lancaster and Adams county.

 

 

The areas you describe are lovely. I sometimes spend a long weekend with friends from new york driving down to the Brandywine museum, Winterthur or Longwood Gardens for a day and spending the night in Center City or somewhere along the mainline. Very charming part of the country.

[+ WilliamM]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/26/how-extreme-weather-is-shrinking-the-planet

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Reflections

November 26, 2018 Issue

How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet

With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts.

By Bill McKibben

 

California is currently ablaze, after a record hot summer and a dry fall set the stage for the most destructive fires in the state’s history. Above: The Woolsey fire, near Los Angeles, seen from the West Hills.

 

Photograph by Kevin Cooley for The New Yorker

 

 

Thirty years ago, this magazine published “The End of Nature,” a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man.

 

I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed likely that we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening. In 1988, George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has become a fierce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s history. After a summer of unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs, a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments.

 

For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. Wars are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. But there are newer signs that human progress has begun to flag. In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out. Late in 2017, a United Nations agency announced that the number of chronically malnourished people in the world, after a decade of decline, had started to grow again—by thirty-eight million, to a total of eight hundred and fifteen million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.” In June, 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. found that child labor, after years of falling, was growing, “driven in part by an increase in conflicts and climate-induced disasters.”