Cascading Climate Impacts in Montana's Beartooth Plateau

Keywords: cryosphere, limnology, mountain, interdisciplinary, art, climate change
Abstract Type: Poster Abstract

Abstract

Though Montana’s Beartooth Plateau hosts a large portion of the state’s glaciers and perennial snow patches, their rapid decline has received scant attention compared to those of Glacier National Park. Vast overestimations of present ice volume used to initialize regional glacio-hydrological models may underestimate rates of cascading hydrological and ecological changes taking place in downstream watersheds including that of the Yellowstone River. Driven by the dearth of data from this region, we partnered with Wild Montana’s Madison-Gallatin chapter to organize the 2021 Beartooth Plateau Expedition. Our expedition constituted the first deliberate effort since 1981 to broadly document glacier-environmental change on the Beartooth Plateau through both academically rigorous and publicly accessible means. Alongside glaciological surveys, historical photo reconstructions, and high-altitude botanical sampling, we collected shallow lake sediment cores from the deepest regions of four lakes in the Lake Fork Valley, a forked catchment draining the eastern side of the Beartooth Plateau. These cores serve as some of the first records from high-elevation lakes in the vicinity and provide material to comparatively analyze rates of environmental change in glacierized versus deglaciated valleys. Alongside our scientific objectives, partnerships with artists aim to strengthen public interest in mountain region climate change by augmenting scientific communication using watercolor and photography. This poster presents preliminary results from our interdisciplinary field program.