Mount Rainier is on its way down

The top of the mountain is coming down. Five different U.S. mountains, including Mount Rainier, are experiencing ice loss at their peaks, bringing down their highest elevations. The problem is likely to worsen.

A new low

Mount Rainier, along with four other ice-capped mountains in the contiguous U.S., has “shrunk since ~1980,” said a study published in the journal Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research. Four of the five shrunk “by at least 6 m (20 ft) due to loss of snow and ice.” The top of Columbia Crest, which is recognized as Mount Rainier’s summit, “no longer stands 14,410 feet above sea level, having lost nearly 21 feet of ice,” said National Parks Traveler.

This change is largely attributed to climate change. The “average air temperature on these summits is significantly higher than it was in the 1950s, almost 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit,” Eric Gilbertson, associate teaching professor at Seattle University and coauthor of the study, said in a statement. Because of this, “there are more and more days that reach above freezing, and we’re seeing ice melt even at the highest elevations.” Along with melting ice, there has been “more precipitation falling as rain rather than snow,” which is also contributing to the shrinking peaks, said ABC News.

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Mount Rainier is the “most glaciated peak in the contiguous United States,” said ABC News. These glaciers play a pivotal role for both humans and the ecosystem as a whole, including providing “essential water for rivers, supplying drinking water downstream, maintaining cold-water habitats for salmon and supporting hydropower generation in the region.”

Melting glaciers are known as a climate tipping point and are an indicator of catastrophic change. “We talk a lot about glaciers losing mass, but those are often at lower elevations,” said Scott Hotaling, an associate professor at Utah State University who worked on the study. “This is an obvious and visceral sign of how climate change is impacting these well-known and once-pristine places.”

Coming round the mountain

Acquiring the data for the study was a “grueling task,” said the statement. The researchers “measured the mountains during late summer, when there is the least snow and the true height of each summit is exposed,” said SF Gate. They “hiked to the tops with high-precision GPS equipment, taking hourlong readings on both the ice and any nearby rock outcrops to see which was higher” and then “backed up those measurements with laser-mapping data and by comparing old and new photos to see how the peaks’ shapes have changed over time.” The findings were submitted to the National Park Service.

Despite the Park Service acknowledging the findings, it “does not independently set summit elevations,” Scott Beason, the Park Service geologist at Mount Rainier National Park, said to National Parks Traveler. That responsibility falls on the U.S. Geological Survey, and currently “no official change has been made to the published elevation of 14,410 feet.”

Studying the true impacts on mountaintop ice loss is challenging because there are currently no “comprehensive databases, historical or contemporary, that track ice-capped summits,” said ABC News. However, it is obvious that we have “entered a new era for the western U.S. cryosphere,” said the study. “Where there is perennial ice, it is likely melting.”