PROVO — In the Beehive State and throughout the Mountain West, enormous reserves of water are frozen, protected and hidden beneath some of the region’s most impressive mountain ranges. Utah’s Mount Timpanogos is home to one of these hidden supplies, called a rock glacier, which feeds Emerald Lake near the mountain’s summit. higher elevations. Rock glaciers like the one at Mount Timpanogos are the subject of a collaborative study by the Utah Geological Survey, Brigham Young University and other Utah universities. “Rock glaciers are similar to an ice glacier that we’re familiar with… It basically looks like a pile of rocks, but everything moves downhill, just like a glacier would,” Greg Carling, BYU geology professor and researcher on the project, said in a video. Getting about 95% of its water from snow cover, rock glaciers are an important and intriguing piece of the water supply puzzle. “They are becoming an important source of water,” Lerato Thoka-Cole, a BYU geology graduate student, said in the video. “The good thing is that once it snows again, the water will go back into the rock glacier, and the ice will be stored back inside, and (the rock glaciers) are not as exposed as normal glaciers are.” For the research, Carling and his students embarked on a six-week expedition, scouring nearly 100 highland rock glaciers across Utah and Colorado in search of glacier-fed outflow streams. Carling said he didn’t expect “What we ended up finding out was that almost everyone had water, so it’s very exciting for us to be able to find that,” Carling said, “especially in late summer when we need that water the most.” In addition to identifying the water sources that feed these glaciers, the team collected water samples and macroinvertebrates to assess water quality. As might be expected from high alpine sources, most water samples have come back fairly clean, Carling said. It’s good news for a state that has remained in drought conditions through the summer and into the meteorological fall, with more than 90% of the state in severe or worse categories, the US Drought Monitor also reported Monday. “It’s great for our water supply.” Carling said when talking about rock glaciers. Water scarcity is an issue Thako-Cole is familiar with. He hopes to apply what he has learned in the highlands of the Mountain West back home. “During my time here, I have developed a feeling of wanting to give back more to my community,” Thako-Cole said. “Right now, Africa is considered a very water-scarce continent, but much of its water is trapped in aquifers, which are groundwater, and has not been tapped. I want to take everything I’ve learned and give it back.” Key findings in this article were generated with the help of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article itself is written solely by humans.
