High in Wyoming’s Beartooth Mountains, scientist Sophia Wensman was taking a turn with a heavy-duty drill when something went wrong.
“Oh. I lost it,” she said.
A long section of the drill had come loose several feet underground.
That’s a problem when you’re nearly 11,000 feet above sea level and there’s no hardware store around the corner.
For the next half-hour, Wensman and the other researchers scraped, tugged and tried to fish the equipment out of the rocky ground. Finally, they pulled it free — and erupted in cheers.
The drill was saved from becoming part of the next ancient record.
And that ancient record? It was sitting right beside them.
The Beartooth Plateau, just outside of Yellowstone National Park, feels almost prehistoric — a treeless jumble of rock and lingering snow, surrounded by jagged peaks; the kind of place where you half-expect a dinosaur to come lumbering over the horizon.
Tucked into that landscape was an ice patch roughly two football fields long.
“So it looks a lot like last year’s snow left over, but within it is actually clear ice that has been frozen for up to thousands and thousands of years,” said Nathan Chellman, a snow and ice scientist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, and Wensman’s colleague.
Unlike glaciers, ice patches don’t flow. That allows ice, plants and even traces of human activity to remain frozen in place for millennia.
Scientists have found ice patches in high mountains around the world, including across the Rockies, Alaska and Canada. But compared with glaciers, researchers know relatively little about how these smaller features form, persist and respond to a warming climate.
A landscape frozen in time
At the bottom of the Beartooth ice patch, meltwater trickled through a small opening beneath the snow and ice.
Nearby, there’s something else emerging.
“You can also see there are big chunks of wood in that melt area,” Chellman said.
Tree stumps.
They’re an especially strange sight in these high windswept mountains, well above where trees grow today.
Researchers have found the remains of an ancient whitebark pine forest preserved in ice elsewhere on the Beartooth Plateau, about 600 feet above today’s treeline. The trees grew there roughly 6,000 years ago, when conditions allowed forests to reach higher into the mountains.
The ice can hold other clues to the past, too. Researchers have drilled cores here to study layers of ice and material trapped inside them, piecing together how the landscape and climate changed over thousands of years.
But those frozen records have an expiration date.
“I mean, we’ve seen ice patches going away in real time,” Wensman said. “Some of these records go back 10,000 years. And so once those are gone, that 10,000 years of history is gone. You know, you can’t reconstruct that.”
The losses are showing up elsewhere in the West.
In Yosemite National Park, researchers found the number of year-round snow patches dwindled from more than 400 in 1988 to fewer than 70 in 2021. Their total area shrank by more than 90%, with warming temperatures driving much of the long-term decline.
Yet compared with glaciers, ice patches remain relatively understudied.
That raises a question while standing beside this one: How does a patch of ice this size survive for thousands of years?
What’s happening beneath the ice?
That brings us back to the drill.
Permafrost scientist Shannon Hibbard wasn’t drilling into the ice itself. She was boring into the rocky ground beside it, trying to answer another question: What’s happening underneath this frozen landscape?
“We want to know if there's permafrost here to see how that permafrost is interacting with this ice patch,” Hibbard said.
Permafrost is ground that remains frozen for at least two consecutive years. Hibbard and the team lowered temperature sensors into the borehole to track how temperatures change underground through the seasons.
The researchers want to learn whether permanently frozen ground could be helping keep the ice above it cold — and perhaps help explain how relatively thin patches of ice can persist for thousands of years.
Once the sensors were lowered into place, Hibbard connected them to a small data logger.
It worked.
And apparently, it had a name.
“It’s logging. Chad is doing his job,” Hibbard said.
“Chad? You named it Chad?!” Chellman replied.
“The other ones have really good names,” Hibbard said. “Chad is Chad.”
Long after the researchers pack up their drills and hike off the plateau, Chad will stay behind, quietly recording temperatures beneath the rocks.
And he’s only one piece of the picture.
“We’re trying to get at the atmosphere above it with the weather station, and the ground beneath it with the permafrost sensors, and then the ice itself with the ice coring,” Chellman said.
Together, those measurements could help researchers understand how ice less than 30 feet thick has persisted here for thousands of years — and whether some ice patches could be more resilient to warming.
Watching an ancient landscape change
There’s an important caveat.
Scientists have only been closely studying these particular Beartooth ice patches for a handful of years — a blink compared with their thousands-of-years-long history. That means they don’t yet have enough observations to say whether these specific patches are shrinking.
But the broader disappearance of alpine ice is clear, Chellman said.
“There’s no doubt that ice in these alpine regions is disappearing at an alarming rate,” he said. “Hopefully, we can understand better if these specific ice patches we’re working on could potentially be more buffered.”
In other words, conditions around some ice patches, including the frozen ground beneath them, could help protect the ice from warming and slow its loss.
For now, the ice is still here.
Meltwater trickles from its base. Ancient wood emerges around its edges. And across the rocky plateau, instruments are quietly taking measurements of the air, ice and frozen ground.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
