Mountain Futures

Rock glaciers, ice worms and wolverines, oh my! In this episode of Come Rain or Shine, we interviewed Dr. Scott Hotaling, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Watershed Sciences and the Extension Climate Resiliency Specialist at Utah State University (USU). Hotaling leads the USU Climate Change in Mountains Lab, where he explores how mountain ecosystems in the western U.S. and elsewhere are impacted by a shifting climate. Hotaling studies mountain water resources and biodiversity, with an emphasis on rock glaciers – large masses of debris-covered ice that flow downhill. 

Dr. Hotaling discussed his diverse work, which includes mentoring students through unique climate adaptation intern and fellowship programs, and translating complex science for the public through creative communication tools. He runs the Mountain Futures YouTube Channel with his team at USU. The channel explores mountain research topics in the western United States and provides a behind-the-scenes perspective into day-to-day life as a mountain scientist. 

Learn more about Dr. Hotaling and his research on the USU Climate Change in Mountains Lab website. 

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Transcript

Sarah: Welcome to Come Rain or Shine, podcast of the US Geological Survey Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, or Southwest CASC 

Emile: and supported by New Mexico State University and the University of Arizona, we’re your co-hosts Emile Elias 

Sarah: and Sarah LeRoy. Here, we highlight stories to share the most recent advances in science, weather and climate adaptation, and innovative practices to support resilient landscapes and communities.

Emile: We believe that sharing some of the most innovative, forward-thinking and creative scientific research and adaptation solutions will strengthen our collective ability to respond to even the most challenging impacts of climate change in one of the hottest and driest regions of the world. 

Sarah: Today, we are speaking with Dr. Scott Hotaling, an assistant professor in the Department of Watershed Sciences and an Extension Climate Resiliency Specialist at Utah State University.

Dr. Hotaling leads the USU Climate Change in Mountains Lab, where he explores how mountain ecosystems in the western US and elsewhere are impacted by a changing climate. He is studying mountain water resources and biodiversity, with an emphasis on rock glaciers, and also leads the Climate Adaptation Intern Program at USU to support the next generation of climate leaders. He is a keen science communicator who, among his many communications activities, runs a YouTube channel with his team at USU.

The channel, which is called Mountain Futures, explores mountain research topics in the western United States. So thanks so much for joining me today, Scott. You have a wide set of activities that you focus on, as I just laid out, from sciences related to mountain ecosystems, to running an internship program, to the climate communications work. So we're going to touch on all of those topics today.

But I just wanted to start with the science. And so you lead the Climate Change in Mountains Lab at USU. So I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that lab in the research that is conducted there? 

Scott: Yeah. Thanks for the great intro. It's lovely to be on this podcast, which I've listened to and have appreciated for a while.

So yeah, so I run the Climate Change in Mountains lab, and the point of that kind of broad moniker is that there's a lot of different things happening in mountains as it relates to climate change, from snowpack decline to biodiversity impacts, to just helping people understand what's happening in those places. And so when I was developing and starting my lab at USU, I was really trying to figure out - well, what is the full scope of what we do? Because I have a background in ecology and evolutionary biology and some molecular tools to study biodiversity, but I also do a lot of other things related to measuring snowpack and streamflow and stuff like that. And so we landed on this Climate Change and Mountains Lab because that's the, that's what it all encompasses, is these contemporary impacts on mountain systems and using that information to then inform what management application there might be from knowing that snowpack is declining in Utah: what do we do downstream of that, both literally and figuratively?

Sarah: Great. And so you just, we talked about your work focusing on high mountain snowpack. And I mentioned rock glaciers. And so just for our listeners - first, what are rock glaciers? That's not a term that we hear very often. But then, also how have rock glaciers been changing over time? 

Scott: Yeah. So rock glaciers are sort of the unsung piece of mountain ice in the western US and around the world.

They are large masses of ice that are covered by debris, and they flow downhill. So they actually move. They don't move a lot. They tend to move like 10 or 20cm a year. But that's a lot of movement when you think about geologic time scales. And all glaciers are essentially frozen rivers. So, a river in the western US tends to start as frozen ice, moving very slowly downhill, and then once it transitions into being liquid form at the toe of the glacier, then it moves more rapidly downhill. And so rock glaciers are just the - a debris covered component of that mountain cryosphere or snow and ice in the mountains. 

And they're really interesting because they are covered by debris. So they're somewhat hidden on the landscape. But that debris cover also, theoretically, the prediction has long been that it will insulate them from contemporary climate change and solar radiation and things like that, and that will allow their internal ice to persist on the landscape longer than other surface ice.

And I say that's long been a prediction, because we didn't have a lot of data to show that that is, or isn't, happening until very recently. So we're about to publish a paper. It's coming out very soon in the Journal of Science Advances, which shows that rock glaciers have been resilient to climate change. In the western US primarily, this work was on the Teton Range relative to surface ice in the same area, in the same elevations.

And so that's exciting from a basic science standpoint, it's cool to know that that prediction is true. But what it also means is that ice that's internal to a rock glacier is going to stay on the landscape longer than other surface ice. And so thinking about cold water biodiversity and fish and aquatic insects living in cold meltwater streams around the US and the rest of the world, that means that these rock glaciers may act as climate refugia. And so if a manager or a park personnel or someone is trying to figure out where should we focus our efforts to protect habitat, a really good place to do that would be downstream of rock glaciers, because those are places that are going to persist in the kind of conditions that already are good for the species, that maybe they're trying to protect from other impacts.

They're like, way more common on the landscape, too. I mean, there are like 10,000 of them in the western U.S., so they're super abundant once people know what they look like, especially in like, California. I mean, of the southwestern states, California and Utah have lots of rock glaciers. They're all over the place, like there's one basin that I work in in central Utah in Little Cottonwood Canyon. And I show folks when I give a talk, a satellite image of these places where they, like, there's some of the most popular hiking trails in Salt Lake City, and there are 11 rock glaciers and one little satellite image view that is like, you know, has the trails walking all around them and over them. And some people are really excited to know that they've walked on meters of ice under their feet, and they didn't realize it.

Yeah, we have a - there's a YouTube video about it. We have one about our rock glaciers, if folks want to see them. 

Sarah: So that's really interesting. And I find it a little counterintuitive, actually, that the debris would be protecting the rock glaciers, given that with snowpack, right, if we have dirt on snow it reduces the albedo and actually warms it quicker.

So how does that…? 

Scott: Yeah. So it's, it's all a question of thickness. So, when there's dust on snow, you create a thin layer of dust, it lowers the albedo, it allows more solar radiation to be absorbed, it gets transmitted directly into the snowpack. It melts it really fast. So dust on snow like dust coming off the drying up Great Salt Lake is really bad for snowpack in the Wasatch Front and northern Utah. I mean, it leads to like - a big dust storm in spring can lead to like a two week earlier snowpack melt time. But if that dust gets thick enough, so rock glaciers tend to have like a meter or two meters of debris covering them, then no longer can what's happening at the surface get transmitted directly to the ice.

And so then it becomes a net insulator. But that's a really good point that it is, it is counterintuitive for folks that know about dust on snow events and how bad those are for snowpack. 

Sarah: Well, that's super interesting. Okay, so switching gears just a little bit, I wanted to talk about – you mentioned your background in ecology, and you've already talked about biodiversity a little bit.

So much of your work explores genomics and genome sequencing, biodiversity and alpine systems. So could you share with us what you're finding related to biodiversity in those ecosystems? 

Scott: Yeah. So I've done a lot in that realm. Much of it has been population genetic-related, where you take genetic information and look for how things are related. So different populations and how much gene flow is occurring.

Like you can take human population genetic data, and basically reconstruct a map of Europe that almost perfectly matches the country's boundaries, because that's where the kind of cultural people tend to stay in their kind of area, with their – the people that speak the same language and that kind of thing. The same tools apply readily to animal and plant species.

And so we've done a lot of work to look at how different populations in the same mountain range or a different mountain range are related. And the kind of general finding is there's a lot of mountaintop isolation. So there are populations that live on one mountaintop that are maybe cold-adapted or adapted to that system, that don't cross the valley to the other mountaintop.

And so those two entities are becoming increasingly isolated genetically. And what it also means is that as climate change proceeds or conditions change, there's not gene flow that could potentially rescue or recolonize. If this population goes away, this population probably isn't going to be the one to save it. And so there's more – habitats are becoming more fragmented for lots of reasons. And then that shows up in the genetic data. 

Sarah: Okay. And so building on that a little bit, I'm wondering if you have specific examples of how changing temperatures might be impacting, like, specific plants and animals in those alpine ecosystems. 

Scott: Yeah, I think the kind of most obvious one for the plant side is just trees and species are moving uphill.

And so we can sort of track, like, treeline itself. And we think of that kind of being the mark of where the alpine ecosystem begins, and the subalpine in other areas end. That alone is moving uphill. So it's been creeping uphill. We have some really cool historical photos from the Uinta mountains in northeastern Utah showing that trees have moved uphill by 40 or 50m in the last, like, 150 years.

And so that's kind of one component. But then for species, like – one that I think is kind of a classic one for folks to connect with – I mean, I'll give a terrestrial one and an aquatic one. So on the terrestrial side are wolverines. So wolverines are kind of the ghost of mountain systems. They're sort of omnipresent but rarely seen.

They're all over the place, and they do this amazing, do all kinds of amazing things. They're active all winter. They store food in snowpack. They use snow and ice to hunt and also to travel between different areas of a mountain range. And so as the snowpack and winter contracts, so does the area where they have space to operate and hunt prey and catch food and those kinds of things.

And so it's really limiting wolverine distributions and wolverine success, especially at lower latitudes where there's just less snowpack on the landscape. And any amount that's lost is really impactful. And then the aquatic side are our various trout species. So all sorts of salmonids which are – kind of include all the trout and salmon and other things – they require a cold water typically for survival, especially native species.

And so if, you know, meltwater sources and snowpack decline, streams tend to get warmer, they tend to flow less. And that often happens late in the season when air temperatures are already high. And so I'm sure people listening to this podcast have seen news stories that are like, oh – like, a closure to fishing in Yellowstone National Park in August or somewhere in California or something.

And so basically, you don't want to stress a fish when it's already extremely stressed. And so that kind of warming temperature is making the fish have to work much harder to survive. And then it also means that there's much, there's reduced recreation opportunities as it relates to them. So – and I can keep going about that, but I'll move on to the next question.

Sarah: So I wanted to talk about algal blooms, because I'm sure some of our listeners have heard about harmful algal blooms or HABs, right, in lakes and coastal ecosystems. That's usually where we hear about these and where they usually come up in the news also. But I actually didn't realize that there are algal blooms in snow ecosystems as well. So could you tell us about alpine snow algal blooms and kind of the impacts of those? 

Scott: Yeah, it surprises people. There are snow algae that grow on snowpack and have these blooms on the snow. I mean, again, if a glacier’s a frozen river, sometimes a snow field can act as a frozen lake. It's a similar premise. And so there's also algae that grow on ice directly, and they're different groups of algae. But we'll talk about snow algae because they're more well known and more obvious. But yeah, people have probably seen “watermelon snow” or pink snow, or this kind of reddish hue that when you go out in the mountains really around this time of year, depending on where you are, you'll see like a red tint to the snowpack, or you'll see an area where the snow is really dark red, like someone sprayed food coloring around on it.

And that's a green algal species that lives in cold places, in snowpack, and it produces a red pigment. And that red pigment is what actually darkens the snow and basically what the algae is doing, we think, and it's obviously not actively doing this, but evolutionarily, what has come of their survival strategy is they produce this pigment, and that pigment darkens the snowpack, just like the dust on snow example, and leads to more meltwater in the snow, which is really good for a species trying to survive in a place where there's not a lot of available water. And that sort of continues to drive the bloom. 

It's not harmful to humans. I mean, we have no evidence that there's anything related to toxicity to drinking water or animals or people when it comes to these snow algal blooms, but it does have consequences for water resources, and similar to dust on snow, you know, algae on snow also affects how long snow sticks around and how it melts. And some of the work that I've been involved with recently is trying to understand what are the controls on snow algal blooms, what are like – in terms of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, are we going to see bigger snow algal blooms as we have warmer temperatures, maybe more atmospheric deposition of nutrients from like farming and agriculture and cities, and like how that might affect future water availability or water resources?

Sarah: Very interesting and also interesting in our next question, are glacier ice worms. So you coauthored an article in 2025 about glacier ice worms. So first question, what are glacier ice worms? But then also what can you tell us about the findings of that research? 

Scott: Yeah. So this could be a whole – I could just – I could just do a monologue for like two hours about ice worms.

People, when they meet me, my wife often, like, she wonders, how long is it going to take til Scott talks about ice worms. So they're very much close to my heart. They're an interesting creature. They're little annelid worms, which means they're a close relative of an earthworm in someone's backyard. So they're a segmented annelid worm that lives in mountain glacier ice and snow.

So they're the largest organism on Earth that spends its whole life cycle in ice. They primarily live in the northwestern US from coastal Washington or kind of central Washington up to southern Alaska, and we know very little about them. And so I have done, kind of slowly tried to grow our understanding of how ice worms live, where they are, how they're genetically related to each other, how they disperse, all sorts of things like that.

And so the paper that we published recently primarily looked at the thermal physiology of ice worms, because there's, like, this natural history note from 50 years ago that said that there's been a little like sentence blurb that – with no methods or anything, any context – just said ice worms can't tolerate temperatures above four degrees Celsius and that they freeze if they get below zero degrees and that that kills them.

So they have this really like narrow temperature tolerance range. And so we actually tested that and showed that while it is true that ice worms can't freeze, which is wild considering they live in ice so they can handle zero degrees Celsius at the freezing point, but they can't handle negative one degree Celsius. And so they live really, really close to their local thermal limit, which is an interesting physiological reality.

But they actually, at least the ones we tested from northwestern Washington, can survive temperatures up to 25 or 30°C. So which is essentially room temperature. And I think that makes sense because kind of like snow algae, it's a hard place to live in an icy, snowy, cold environment. And so if you can produce pigment and absorb solar radiation to warm your body up, warm up the snow around you, get some water, allow your biochemistry to work more effectively, then that's a really good evolutionary strategy.

So there's not really a good reason why they would not survive warmer temperatures if they were, if there was a potential for selection to allow for that. So it was cool to test a something from 50 years ago with kind of modern research tools. 

Sarah: Yeah, that is really cool. So another article that you coauthored focused on ice cap summits in the western US. So again, could you talk about that research and what you found? 

Scott: Yeah, this was a really exciting and fun project, which actually stems from our lab’s YouTube channel. So I got a hold of this, or I saw this news article about this guy who had been measuring ice caps around the western US and measuring mountains in general. His name's Eric Gilbertson.

He's an MIT trained engineer who is also a pretty obsessive mountain climber. Eric's trying to climb the tallest mountain in every country on Earth, which is a serious undertaking once you start thinking about how many countries there are and some of the mountains that are included on that list. But Eric's also an engineer, and so he was very interested in just – how accurate are some of these mountain summit measurements, especially for places where we haven't, you know, there hasn't been a lot of really, you know, good surveying over the years.

And he wasn't really thinking about climate change, but there was a news article about some of his work on Mount Rainier, where he had some preliminary findings that Mount Rainier, one of the most famous mountains in the western US and, like, an icon of a national park, was shorter than what it was supposed to be, based on the USGS survey from 50 years ago that was the widely accepted one. 

And so when I saw that, I was immediately like, well, that's both really intriguing, maybe not surprising because of, you know, the warming that's been happening and mountains around the world, but also really surprising because if you asked me, a mountain climate change expert, if the summit of Mount Rainier was experiencing climate impacts – this is a place that's over 4000m in height. It's at a fairly high latitude. It gets a huge amount of snowpack. And so it should be buffered in many ways against climate impacts directly. If it's being impacted, like ice is melting on the summit of Rainier, I would have said probably not. Like, all over the rest of the mountains, sure, but not at such an extreme elevation with such cold temperatures.

And so we worked with someone at UC Merced, John Abatzoglou who's a climate scientist and reconstructed kind of the summit climate of Rainier and other mountains that have ice as their highest point, all in Washington state is where they all are these days in the lower 48 states. And looked at both that, and also did some remeasuring and took some other kind of types of data.

And we showed that Mount Rainier is in fact shrinking. It's losing about a foot of elevation every year, and it's because it has this little ice dome on the summit, and that ice dome is just getting smaller and smaller. And so what the takeaway from that, for me, for anyone that cares about this stuff, is that there is nowhere in the lower 48 states where climate impacts aren't happening right there in that space. It's not a thing that's happening somewhere else and like is impacting it secondarily. Everywhere is experiencing change. So even all the way up to the highest mountains in the western US. 

Sarah: Yeah. Very interesting to think about how a mountain could actually be shrinking, I guess. Okay. I want to kind of switch gears away from your research specifically and talk more about the internship programs that you work with.

And so you play a big role in mentoring students, and then you also coordinate a few internship/fellowship opportunities. And so I just want to talk about a couple of these. One of them is at USU, the Climate Adaptation Intern Program. Could you talk a little bit about that program and then also describe some of the projects that your interns work on?

Scott: Yeah. So the Climate Adaptation Intern Program is a bit of a mouthful. So we call it CAPE, which is its acronym, as our way of referring to it, ,so I'll talk about it in that way too. And so CAPE is like probably the most inspiring thing that I think I've done in my career so far or been part of.

So when I got to USU as the state's first ever Climate Resiliency Extension Specialist, that wasn't, it's a very broad charge. And it wasn't clear exactly what I should do with it. And there was no roadmap for that. So I took that, and one of the things that I felt like was, felt the most strongly about was I have to create a way to engage young people in climate adaptation work. Both because they're very passionate and concerned about potential climate change impacts, and also because that's a huge workforce development opportunity and career outlet for them in dealing with climate change, sea level rise, wildfire risk, water resource availability, biodiversity impacts.

These things are going to be integrated into so many careers in the future that if I want to set students up to not only make a difference, but also be able to be in those shoes, I think having that training is really powerful. And so we created this program alongside my co-coordinator of it, Dr. Kendall Becker. And basically every semester we have 8 to 10 undergrad interns who work on climate adaptation topics that are relevant for Utah and the western US kind of broadly.

And we select those topics by people we work with. Community members, like the city of Moab has been one of our partners, and they essentially are concerned about extreme heat. They're already a desert city. They already experience extreme heat. They know that, like, you know, cities can warm, can create, like, heat islands and stuff. But a lot of that work isn't focused on a place that's already so extreme.

And so we worked with them to pair an intern with – essentially, how does a desert city deal with extreme heat? And so our interns produce fact sheets. So they produce basically research synthesis products about their topic that's based on the peer reviewed literature but is really written for a general audience. So it's not written for other scientists or academics.

It's written for the public, city planners, legislature-type folks, really anyone that's kind of outside of academia. And so, so far we've published, I think, 18 fact sheets on all sorts of topics, from cloud seeding to desert city heat. And it's been really neat to see not only the students engaging with it and kind of feeling empowered and like they're making a difference and like they're gaining really valuable career skills, but also the general public interacting with them.

So we have good metadata on what happens with them. And they've been downloaded, like, I think a little over 10,000 times since June of 2024. And so – and we can see that they're being downloaded by state legislature internet. They're being downloaded by, one's been downloaded by the US Senate a few times. And so someone there, some staffer or legislative member themselves was reading over that kind of product.

So it's a nice way to connect directly to people. 

Sarah: Yeah. And are the students involved in any outreach specifically or they kind of post the documents and then see what happens? How does that work? 

Scott: Yeah. So their main effort is to produce the document. So they're an intern for 14 weeks. And they come in, we identify an idea, and then we work on it in a pretty efficient cohort-style framework to get to a document. They also work with outside experts who weigh in. But we're trying to develop more engagement opportunities. So we had an event in Park City, Utah last October where we brought the community in to see. We made posters of the student products of the fact sheets, and then had a little presentation about the program and about recent climate change in Utah, and had interns there to talk with folks about their experience.

And so we've done – we did another one in Logan, Utah, at the library in our city where we had just kind of a community climate information and adaptation sharing kind of evening, which was, that was really cool because there was essentially standing room only. I think like 65 people showed up on a Wednesday at like 6 p.m. to hear from students about climate adaptation topics.

And so we realized there's a desire in the communities and among the general public to talk about these things. And we think that's a good way to connect the students to those settings. But we're still ramping up that side of it. 

Sarah: Yeah. That's great. I imagine it's a great experience for students to be able to engage in that way. I know I didn't have that experience as a student. So in a related program, the Southwest CASC has a fellowship program – a little bit different – called the Natural Resources Workforce Development Fellowship. Talk about a mouthful again. So we say NRWD. But in this program, as you know, graduate students from the consortium institutions, they actually work together for a year on a shared project.

And obviously you've been a big part of this since you're the lead for this program. So would you mind describing the program, maybe the project they're working on this year, and then how students could get involved if they're interested, since they know we're talking about next year or future years also. 

Scott: Yeah. So NRWD is also really inspiring. Exciting. It’s been a fun thing to be part of. It's, it's different from CAPE in a few ways. One, I didn't start it. So there's been a bunch of great people. Michelle Baker, my co-lead who has been there from the beginning, who helped really design and come up with it and then execute it. So I've been, it's been wonderful to learn from her and work on it alongside her.

But we bring together graduate students from all of our (SW CASC) consortium institutions, so all across the southwest with very different skill sets. So hydrologists, data scientists, atmospheric scientists, ecologists all together to work on a shared problem or issue. And these issues kind of like CAPE come from outside partners. And so for this year they're working on environmental flows. And essentially, how do we allocate water for the environment to sustain fisheries or get water to the Great Salt Lake, or do things like that in the context of existing water allocations and water rights and the complicated nature that is water in the West?

And so through that, we work with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, and we have this great crop of graduate students that are – they design their own survey for it to get basically perceptions from people in Salt Lake Basin around things like water banking and water markets, where you can essentially sell part of a water right to the state of Utah to allow that water to go to the Great Salt Lake instead of being used to irrigate a field, because basically changing how we allocate water and how we use it is a lot – is probably the most important and valuable tool that we have.

We're not going to get more water. But on the topic of more water, there is a technology called cloud seeding where you actually can enhance existing clouds to create more snowpack in Utah and places like that. And so for next year, the NRWD cohort will work on cloud seeding and all that comes with that. And that will be – the exact direction will be dictated by the cohort and our partners as we develop it.

And so for any future students, we put out a call every spring. So it's typically I want to say in like March or April, where we put out a call for applications, you have to be at one of the (SW CASC) member institutions. So at Utah State, University of Arizona, UC Davis and a few others, UCLA, UNLV, and you apply. It’s a short application.

And then we select from that. And so I really encourage people to either apply or reach out to me or Michelle Baker, if you have any questions or ideas or thoughts, or you want to collaborate on it – like if you're a cloud seeding expert and you have something to share, we'd love to hear from you. 

Sarah: Excellent. So you mentioned your YouTube channel. And so I wanted to kind of talk about that. It's called Mountain Futures. You create videos that help share and elevate the work that you do. The channel actually provides a behind-the-scenes perspective right into the daily life of a mountain scientist. And you've covered all sorts of topics, ranging from glacier recession to mountain wildlife. Wolverines, you mentioned those already.

And of course, ice worms. Your favorite topic to talk about. So I'm just curious, what are the most fun, most challenging parts of running a YouTube channel? And maybe if you want to speak to this, of science communication more broadly. 

Scott: Yeah, I love that question because the YouTube channel is, I love having a creative outlet as a scientist. Like people think of science as being very dry and like it's the facts and you report the facts and it's non-biased and it should be that way. Certainly, it should be objective, it shouldn't be, you know, we're not advocates. We are evidence sharers. But that doesn't mean that you can't have really nice figures in a paper or do bring an artistic or creative side to it.

And the YouTube channel has just been amazingly fun in that way. And I didn't finish the thread earlier of why the mountain ice cap peaks thing came from the YouTube channel. What the connection was there. So I saw that news story about this guy, Eric Gilbertson. I reached out to him and said, like, I have this YouTube channel. Can I interview you about your work on Mount Rainier and your measurements? And so I interviewed him and he basically was just telling me that, like, he has a data set, it's robust, but he's not like, he's not really – he's in a position where he doesn't do research. He's in a primarily teaching-focused position. And so it's not really his wheelhouse to do the kind of analysis and publication side of it.

And so he wanted to talk about also, just like, how can he publish this paper or what does he need to actually publish his data? And so I was like, well, we need to have some climate analysis in there, and we should really have some better measurements, and more of them. And so we just started collaborating and we wound up writing the paper together.

And so I sort of found this collaboration via interviewing someone from my YouTube channel, which was definitely not the goal. But it's been really neat because it allows me to share parts of the mountain world that people just don't know about. Like we have a YouTube video about ice worms, and people can go on there and they can see ice worms doing this crazy thing where every afternoon in the summer, they emerge from the glacier ice, come to the surface. They're at numbers of like 3 to 400 per square meter. So the surface of a glacier is wriggling with little black worms, which I know sounds horrifying to some people, but it's also just completely incredible. It's like one of those little Planet Earth-type phenomena that, as far as I know, no one had ever filmed. And it's not like I'm some kind of amazing filmmaker. I'm just, I spend time in these places and so it's really neat to share it with them. 

But then also it's nice to be able to show, like what a day of our fieldwork looks like, because people also think that what I do is like extreme, like – it's like I have some incredible background in mountain climbing or extreme recreation and adventure, and I want to show people that, like, anyone can be a mountain scientist. It's similar to any type of research or something. And so it's, it's very accessible. And just so people can see that it's not big or scary. 

And then we also highlight other people's work. And so like there's some really amazing work happening in Canada looking at how glaciers, as they recede they’re uncovering new rivers that haven't been ice free in like 10,000 years.

And salmon are recolonizing those rivers. But there's also mining claims on these new rivers that are creating, kind of, conflicts between people and the environment. And so I interviewed a professor at Simon Fraser University about that. And so it's a nice way to also elevate other research and work that's happening. I'm really excited to maybe interview some of the other Southwest CASC researchers as part of the effort.

But I'll close with this kind of long answer with the challenges. So it's really hard to make good science communication products, as the Rain or Shine folks know. Even when it's audio only, it's still really, really hard. You add video in there, it becomes another can of proverbial worms. So it's been challenging as an academic who's not trained in any of this stuff to put together good videos and to do it in a timely fashion.

But yeah, we're going to keep doing it and see where it takes us. 

Sarah: Well, we appreciate your effort in this front. And like you were saying, you know, there are studies that, you know, as scientists, we can provide the data, we can provide the evidence, but there are actually studies that show when that's in a narrative form, it actually sticks in people's heads longer. Right? You ask someone to recall numbers. They can't recall that, but they can recall the story that you told them about those numbers. And so that's why it's so important. 

And I wanted to circle back for a second to the snow-capped mountains in these shrinking mountains that we talked about, because I do think it's really interesting. You know, obviously mountains change height in geologic timescales, but in our lifetime it's a little different to think about.

So question for you. How do you measure the height of a mountain? You say, you know, you can measure it shrinking by a foot each year, but how do you actually measure that? 

Scott: Yeah. So we actually have three lines of evidence for doing this because we want to be really sure. So one is there's something called a differential GPS – or there's other names for it in the measurement and spatial research world – but it's a really highly accurate GPS that basically knows exactly where it is in space. And so we took one of those to the summit of Mount Rainier and did one hour measurements where it can get down to like centimeter level accuracy of the height of that device in space. And we did that in a few different places, including on USGS landmarks that are not ice that have been surveyed previously and are presumed to not be changing.

And so we confirmed its accuracy there. Then measure the actual ice. And so we could do both relative to that and independently. There's also this amazing tool called LIDAR. So it's essentially using lasers to measure the Earth, to put it as shortly as I can. And there's a LIDAR data set from the USGS that was produced for the entire western US a few years ago.

And so we were able to use that LIDAR data set of the mountaintops and look at how high those exact highest points are, and compare that to our GPS data. And then we also used photo. There's software that can take a photograph and can take known elevation points, and then give you the elevation of another feature in the photograph.

And so we had all three of those lines of evidence, and we just had photographs showing that like, here's a rock, here's snow. I'm holding up my hands. Used to be this high. Now the snow is this high and the rock is still there, and now it's higher than it. And so that kind of confirmed from what we were seeing from our three quantitative lines of evidence was real.

But yeah, it was definitely an interesting thing to go down considering I have no background in that world. But we – of course Eric does. And then there are other folks that we had review the data, and it was important in that case that it be peer reviewed and go through the process, because we needed to be sure that the data were good and what we were saying was accurate.

So now then it could be maybe turned into a fact sheet down the road. So the peer review process is important. It's just not the endpoint of research. 

Sarah: Yeah. Interesting. Okay. I wanted to just – shifting to kind of wrapping up here a little bit. So first question, is there anything that we didn't ask you that you would like to share with our listeners?

Scott: Yeah. One thing. I've been – so lately, I've gotten really interested in how we preserve snow in the mountains. And so we all have seen the news about like reservoirs and things getting lower and essentially snowpack, seasonal snowpack, is the largest natural reservoir of water on Earth when it's there (it certainly changes dynamically, you know, in space and time.) But when snow builds up in the mountains, it builds up. It's a huge volume of water, which is really important for then buffering streamflow and water resources in the summer when we kind of need it the most. 

And in Europe, for like 20 years, there's been work slowly trying to largely preserve the ski season. And so basically, how do you keep snow around so that you can have it to ski on the next winter or, you know, whatever?

And so I've kind of always thought that, like, that's going to come to the US, people are going to start doing that. And yes, it has started to happen in the US. And I was just out last week at this place in Utah called Soldier Hollow. It's a Nordic center, and they are doing a test experiment where they blew – they took all their snowmaking guns, and they made a huge pile of snow in February, and then they covered it in a giant white insulated tarp.

And the idea is that that tarp will, will reflect solar radiation back. And by making it a big pile, it's going to have a much larger thermal inertia. And so that snow pile, I'm virtually certain, will persist all summer under that tarp at 6500ft, which is not high. And it's going to see triple digit temperatures, atmospheric temperatures around it, and there's going to be snow there that they will then spread out to get their cross-country Nordic ski season started early. From the snow they made the previous winter. And that is a really exciting management tool for both winter recreation, you know, putting, you know, a big pile of snow in a certain area that then can melt for irrigation. You're basically creating non impactful little mini reservoirs of water. And so in the case of Soldier Hollow, they're going to be one of the sites for the 2034 Olympics.

And so they're very, very concerned about – we just had a historically bad winter in Utah. And so it's been really exciting to me to be able to talk with them, walk them through potential options, and be the sort of global expert or just the globally interested person on, like, what are people doing in other places? And then also to start to collect data and help them analyze some data of how their experiment’s working.

And so that's a place that will be doing more and more of that in the future. 

Sarah: Well, if you and I are still around, I say still around. Still around in these jobs in eight years. We'll invite you back to the podcast and we can hear how it worked for the 2034 Olympics. 

Yeah, because I mean, they make, you know, I'm in Arizona, so up in Flagstaff some year, I don't know if it's every year, but they make snow for Snow Bowl because – the ski resort up there and it's not getting enough snow every year.

So it's interesting to hear. But that's just for, you know, a few days or this, that season. It's not preserving it through the summer for the following season. Or, then I start thinking about scaling this on a larger scale and what that means for river streamflow down through the Colorado River or something. And yeah, that's interesting. Okay.

Thanks for bringing it up. Okay. Let's talk about hope. So you, if you've listened to this podcast, you hear us talk about hope at the end of every episode. So I would like to ask you what gives you hope for the future. 

Scott: Yeah. So the rock glaciers do. They're certainly not going to solve all of our mountain climate change water challenges, but it's really, really exciting to see a piece of ice in the mountains of the western US that's stable, that isn't losing huge chunks of mass every single year, like glaciers and snow fields and things like that.

So the rock glaciers are – give me some hope. The students give me a lot of hope. I mean, they, they're very nervous about climate change and they're anxious about it, but they are also not – they don't view it as a thing that cannot be solved. They seem pretty optimistic that, they aren't sure how, but that it is – we can figure it out, and we kind of have to have that mentality because we can and we know a lot of the drivers.

And so it's really neat to see that they are not kind of defeated in the way that some of my age peers sometimes seem to be. And so those are probably the two kind of biggest things. But then also like I mean, I'm in Utah, it's a dry state, has a wide range of beliefs and thoughts around things, but everyone looks at the snowpack and knows that it's changing.

And they know that that's an existential problem. And so that also gives me some hope that we can actually like rally around some things that, again, it's something that people connect to. Like it's kind of that narrative point where it's skiing and it's the history of skiing, or it's the history of runoff, or when they would take their cows out to a grazing area or something every year. And how that's shifting. 

And so the fact that it's so visible and so talked about makes me pretty inspired that something is going to happen that's good. And so – and there's a lot of movement. I mean, there's stuff with the Great Salt Lake, there's plenty of things that are small victories that we're, we're moving in the right direction, even if it feels slow.

Sarah: Yeah, thanks for that. It's always good to connect around those shared values. And clearly in Utah, snowpack is a shared value in different ways for different people. So last question. What is one thing that you would like listeners to remember from our conversation? 

Scott: That's a good question. That one I am just thinking about for the first time at this moment.

I think the connections between the fact that what we do in our lives and how, you know, the energy that we produce and the food we eat, and all of those kind of aspects of daily life, that actually does change what happens in places like the mountains. Even though it feels really remote and disconnected and like it's not really a part of daily life, like what happens in mountains of the southwestern United States especially, really does flow down to our faucets and streams and yards and rivers and all of that.

And so I think it, like when I look at the solar panels on my house, I'm happy that, like, at least in my own little realm, I am doing something that helps to protect snow and winter and all of the recreation and biodiversity and the things that I care deeply about via that action. And so while not everyone owns a house or can put solar panels in their house or whatever, there are tons of things that people can do to contribute to adapting to what's happening in the world, and I would just encourage them to look at their own lives and Google and whatever to help discover those ways.

Sarah: Okay, great. Thank you so much, Scott, for joining me today and having a very vibrant and interesting conversation. 

Scott: It's a lot of fun. It's fun to go through all the different things.

Emile: Thanks for listening to Come Rain or Shine, podcast of the USGS Southwest CASC, New Mexico State University and the University of Arizona. If you liked this podcast, don't forget to rate or review it and subscribe for more great episodes. 

Sarah: A special thanks to our production crew, Reanna Burnett and Lauren White. If you want more information, have any questions for the speakers, or would like to offer feedback, please reach out to us via our websites.