Latest Collier Glacier Stories

An Oregon State University research program has returned to Collier Glacier for the first time in almost 20 years and found that the glacier has decreased more than 20 percent from its size in the late 1980s.The findings are consistent with glacial retreat all over the world and provide some of the critical data needed to help quantify the effects of global change on glacier retreat and associated sea level rise.Flowing down the flanks of the Three Sisters in the central Oregon Cascade Range,...

BEND, Ore. -- Between the North Sister and Middle Sister in Oregon's Cascade Range, Collier Glacier has advanced and receded for hundreds of thousands of years. But like many glaciers, it is headed in one direction these days: backward.It is in serious peril, says geologist Ellen Morris Bishop of the Fossil-based Oregon Paleo Lands Institute. "We have basically a really sad picture of Collier Glacier today."Geologists blame among other things a warming climate, altering the...