Ice Age Utah

A week ago today, I woke up to another foot of snow. That was on top of older snow which had been on the ground since early December. The storm was part of a 4-day event that finally ended on Wednesday, by Saturday the temperature, which had hovered no higher then the mid-thirties all winter long, had jumped to 55 degrees F. Seemingly, our long winter has finally come to an end and the three feet of everlasting snow in the back yard is finally melting away. It can be forgiven if I complain a lot about it. This has simply been the worst winter I have gone through in my entire life. Most of the winters here have 4 to 6 days when the snow is so bad that I have to shovel or snow blow the driveway and sidewalks. This season there have been 26 times which it was necessary to do that. A years worth of precipitation has fallen locally in 6 months so far, and the mountains around us have broken all previous records for total snowfall.

I can draw some comparisons to the late, unlamented Ice Age, that covered a good part of North America with a mile of so of ice, (and to be fair, it was only the very northern states that were covered). Here in Utah at the end of the last Ice Age surge, only 12,000 years ago, we had our own unique impact from that much ice and water. Lake Bonneville, whose ancient shoreline lies under the foundation of my house, was filled with melt water from those glaciers. Currently a mere puddle remains of that body of water, the Great Salt Lake, and is struggling under a drought. It has seemingly been reprieved for the time being from a total dry-out by the bounty of this winters overflow. Its future is still somewhat in doubt if we see a return to dryer conditions.

The margins of that huge fresh-water Ice Age lake was home to many kinds of megafauna. There were big-horn sheep, horses and bison. Other animals included mammoths, mastodons, camels horses, muskoxen and giant ground sloths. They were preyed upon by saber-toothed cats and dire wolves. About this time, the giant lake broke its bounds and began to rapidly shrink, and most of these giant animals became extinct in this area. We know that because their bones have been found over much of the state. So was it a sudden change in the weather, much like it has been over the last week here? Did these cold-adapted creatures simply become unable to cope with the warmer weather that suddenly appeared? Utah’s famous Huntington mammoth remains were found in the mountains of central Utah at an elevation of 9,000 feet and was estimated to have died 10,500 years ago. Did this creature climb up there to find cooler weather? Was he the last of his kind here and did the warmer weather finally do him in?

(My photo of replicas of the Huntington mammoth and a saber-toothed cat in an exhibit of Ice Aged creatures. Snow blowing the driveway is difficult enough, having to watch out for these animals as well would have been quite harrowing.)