Utah’s Hidden Ice: Rock Glaciers Store Nearly a Billion Tons of Water
Scientists mapped ice buried under Utah’s rock glaciers using gravity data, estimating about 0.99 gigatonnes (nearly 1 billion tons) of water in Utah’s intact rock glaciers. Focusing on the Timpanogos Rock Glacier beneath Mount Timpanogos, they collected 232 gravity measurements and applied 3D Bayesian inversion to reveal an ice-rich core that is roughly 72% ice by volume (83% in the core) and averages 18.8 metres thick, totaling about 1.55 million cubic metres of ice—enough to fill around 600 Olympic pools. This buried ice could persist for centuries and represents a climate-resilient water resource, though it also poses hazards if destabilized.
