Download Glacier National Park

By: Erik Feys
A bill designating Glacier National Park was signed by the
President Taft May 11, 1910. The park fell to the
management of the National Park Service upon the agency's
inception in 1916, and it is still managed by the U.S. National
Park Service. In 1932, Canada and the United States declared
Waterston Lakes National Park and neighboring Glacier
National Park the world's first International Peace Park. While
administered as two separate entities, the park's two sections
cooperate in wildlife management, scientific research and
some visitors services.
170 million years ago, when a collision of the
Earths crustal plates elevated numerous mountain
chains and formed the ancestral Rocky Mountains
and the glaciers formed some of the mountains.
Erosion stripped away the upper part of the original
rock wedge and exposed the rocks and structures
visible in the park today.
The rocks that are found in glacier is
sedimentary rocks
Glacier has acquired a computerized geographic information system.
GIS is a powerful tool that combines various hardware and software
elements to manipulate and compare spatial information in ways
that would be extremely laborious or impossible to do by hand. For
example, Glacier's GIS has been used to overlay maps of drainages,
topography, roads, and vegetation types in order to identify areas
that may be susceptible to invasion by exotic plants. The GIS has
also been used to analyze the effects of the Red Bench fire that
burned in the North Fork area in 1988. GIS is an innovative and
rapidly developing technology the capabilities of which are only
beginning. Future uses of Glacier's GIS might include mapping of
habitat components for individual species and predictive modeling
of landscape changes in response to fire, global warming, or other
ecosystem stuff.
http://www.nps.gov/PWR/customcf/apps/map
s/showmap.cfm?alphacode=glac&parkname=
Glacier%20National%20Park