Most glaciers are pure white in form but this unique persistent body of dense ice looks like the ‘skin of an elephant’.

Tucked high 11,000 feet over sea level and about 70 odd miles of Billings, Montana US in the Beartooth Mountains of Custer National Forest which is a mixture of pine, spruce and fir trees due to the increased altitude and more abundant rainfall lies the famed Grasshopper Glacier (GG)

GG gets its bizarre appearance from tens of millions of grasshoppers - locusts, to be precise which are entombed in its icy domain and trapped for nearly 300 years ago.

But due to global warming, GG has over the years shrunk considerably in size, from the original length of nearly five miles to less than a mile today. 

GG was discovered in the early 1900s by geologist J.P. Kimball who then sent samples of the insect species to the U.S. Bureau of Entomology in 1914, where it was discovered that Rocky Mountain locusts, a species that went extinct over a century ago, possibly because their eggs were run over by the plows of farmers in the American West were trapped in the body of dense ice formations.

The most popular theory for the glacier’s multitude of frozen bugs is that centuries ago, a swarm of billions of locusts were migrating over the Rocky Mountains when they were trapped by a massive winter storm. The ice has frozen these specimens in time and here they lie trapped for eternity.

This piece of living biological history stands as a testimony to the fact that Global Warming is real and very soon in a span of less than a hundred years Mother Earth will never be the same again.
 

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