Scientists from the University of Utah have mapped a hidden body of ice beneath the summit cirque of Mount Timpanogos, finding frozen ice as thick as 150 feet (45 meters) in places and a total volume near 1.55 million cubic meters — enough to fill roughly 600 Olympic swimming pools, their report says.
How they found what you can't see
The field site sits above Emerald Lake in a bowl-shaped cirque where loose rock and talus conceal a rock glacier: a core of ice covered by several meters of stone. Standard tools for sizing glaciers — ground-penetrating radar — perform poorly in such material because rock mixed into the ice scatters radio signals and produces noisy data. The research team instead measured minute variations in gravity across the site.
Lead author Bronson Cvijanovich and colleagues made six trips up the mountain during the 2024 field season, hiking a roughly 8-kilometer route that climbs about 1,100 meters. They collected gravity readings at 232 points on a grid spaced about 25 meters apart, data that were then modeled statistically to produce a three-dimensional image of the buried ice. The full data set is published by the Utah Geological Survey and the results appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface.
“Timpanogos Rock Glacier is surprisingly ice-rich. It is 83% ice and 17% loose rock,”
The gravity method exploits the fact that rock is denser than ice; where the subsurface contains more ice the gravitational pull at the surface is fractionally weaker. The signal is faint enough that the team accounted for influences such as the positions of the sun and moon in their analysis, a detail noted in earlier coverage.
What the numbers mean locally
The study found the buried ice ranges from an average thickness of about 19 meters across the core to maximum thicknesses approaching the 150-foot figure along the centerline. The modeled volume — roughly 1.55 million cubic meters — provides a concrete measure of how much stored water exists in this hidden form above the watershed.
- Ice composition: estimated 83% ice, 17% loose rock.
- Thickness: average ~18.8 meters, centerline up to 45 meters (150 feet).
- Volume: ~1.55 million m3 (≈600 Olympic pools).
- Movement: the rock glacier creeps downhill at 8–20 cm per year.
Although the stored ice is substantial, authors caution that much of the mass is buried beneath rock and not directly accessible as surface snowpack or perennial snowfields are. Still, rock glaciers can act as slow-release stores of water that sustain springs and streamflow during dry periods; their evolution under warming conditions is a topic of active research.
Scientific and public implications
For Utah, where water resources are tightly contested and climate change is shifting snowpack dynamics, quantifying previously hidden ice has practical implications. The presence of an ice-rich rock glacier on Mount Timpanogos contributes to the broader picture of high-elevation cryospheric change across the Wasatch Range and other western mountains.
Experts say hidden ice bodies may be more widespread than previously appreciated, but they are hard to detect: radar can fail in talus-covered ice, and many high-elevation sites are difficult to access. Gravity surveys, combined with statistical modeling and careful field work, provide an alternative approach for mapping these stores.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Survey points | 232 |
| Grid spacing | ~25 meters |
| Average ice core thickness | ~18.8 meters |
| Maximum thickness | 30–45 meters (100–150 feet) |
| Estimated volume | ~1.55 million cubic meters |
The study also emphasizes methodological care: researchers adjusted for astronomical tidal effects in their gravity data and used statistical models to weigh plausible subsurface shapes against readings. That rigor helps reduce uncertainty in converting tiny gravity variations into a spatially resolved ice map.
For hikers and residents, the findings underscore how much of the high-country environment is hidden from view. For water managers and scientists, they add a quantified piece of the puzzle about mountain water storage that could influence models of streamflow and groundwater recharge as the climate continues to warm.
The research team’s data and modeling products are publicly available through the Utah Geological Survey, offering a resource for future studies of rock glaciers and frozen water storage in the Intermountain West.
