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Swarm 2
Wed Nov 24, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Yesterday, Jeff Rice reported on the
historic swarms of Rocky Mountain locusts. Today, he finds out where they all went.
JR: As recently as the late 19th century, locusts swarmed across the west in
staggering numbers. Jeffrey Lockwood: entomologist and the author of the book,
"Locust."
JL: They were sometimes described actually as sort of like summer blizzards or dust
storms maybe. People perceived this sort of rolling, grayish yellowish sort of cloud
coming at them.
JR: By the beginning of the 20th century, the Rocky Mountain locust had mysteriously
vanished. Lockwood set out to solve the mystery and searched for the answers in an
unlikely place: the glaciers of Wyoming's Wind River Range.
JL: There's half a dozen glaciers in the Rocky Mountains that bear the name either
"grasshopper" or "hopper" glacier.
JR: Global warming is causing these glaciers to melt, revealing the bodies of locusts
that had been trapped inside.
JL: Sort of an entomological night of the living dead, with these locusts sort of coming
out of the ice.
JR: Through genetic testing of these thawed hoppers, Lockwood showed that their
populations had been healthy. This supports the theory that the locusts were killed
suddenly by human settlements in crucial river valley habitats. Lockwood wonders if
the melting glaciers and the locusts also have another message for us.
JL: Right, now what we have is the capacity of humans to just not alter the one of the
most abundant life forms ever to occur on the North American continent, but now we're
realizing that humans have the capacity to alter natural processes at a global
scale.
JR: Lockwood cautions that changes in the climate revealed by the melting of so-called
"grasshopper glaciers" could make swarms of locust pale in comparison.
The Weather Notebook is a program of the Mount Washington Observatory, funded by
Subaru of America.
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