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GARDINER, Mont. — The Manning family watched a nearby house fall from the riverbank into raging, flood-swollen waters before evacuating their rental cottage on the edge of Yellowstone National Park.

“The land on the bank was falling in sheets,” said Parker Manning, who was traveling with his family from Terre Haute, Ind. to Yellowstone for a summer vacation.

“It was crazy when the building finally fell into the water,” said Mr Manning. “She was floating on the river like a boat.”

The floodwaters that swept Yellowstone this week changed the flow of rivers, destroyed bridges, destroyed homes and forced thousands of visitors to evacuate from the country’s land. oldest national park.

It’s difficult to directly attribute the damage in Yellowstone to a rapidly warming climate—the rivers have overflowed for millennia—but scientists are alarming that climate change-related devastation will reach nearly all regions in the coming years. 423 national parksespecially vulnerable to rising temperatures.

The threatening prayer reads like a biblical account: fire and flood, melting ice sheets, rising seas and heat waves.

Rangers at Glacier National Park in Montana are counting down the years when there will be no ice in the park.

Cacti in Arizona’s Saguaro National Park, icons of the rugged, arid West, with their thorny arms stretching out against the bright blue desert sky, are dying from the heat.

Extreme heat is also a major problem in Joshua Tree National Park.

Joshua trees are dying from both rising temperatures and wildfires. a flame in 2020 Killed 1.3 million treesleft the park management to describe an area as a “graveyard of Joshua tree skeletons.”

Climate change has increased temperatures across the United States. But in the arid Southwest or Arctic, many national parks are at high altitudes, so they are disproportionately affected by global warming. A 2018 study found that: Temperatures in national parks are doubling as a country as a whole.

“Each of our more than 400 national parks is suffering,” said Stephanie Kodish, climate change program director for the National Parks Conservation Society, a nonprofit and impartial advocacy group.

The culprit of extreme weather conditions is clear in most cases, Ms Kodish said: Temperature rises caused by humans are destroying what Americans see as pristine escapes from the traffic-congested and sedentary landscapes of their daily lives.

“We are literally making a choice to destroy these things that are the gems of our world, the gifts we must pass on to us,” he said.

Climate change-related damage is occurring from Florida to Alaska.

In Everglades National Park, vast wetlands southwest of Miami, rising sea levels are causing salinization of groundwater, endangering tropical orchids and other endangered wildlife.

In and around Yosemite National Park, the jewel of the Sierra Nevada, summertime wildfires pose a constant threat. Over the past few years, visitors to the popular park have passed through vast landscapes of charred logs. Park rangers also faced bizarre weather events they had never witnessed before: In January last year, storms pierced a giant sequoia grove and knocked down 15 mature trees, devastating the recently built visitor facilities.

In addition, forest fires in the last two years killed thousands of giant sequoias in nearby Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks.

The National Park Service is experimenting with ways to adapt to the changing climate. The federal infrastructure bill passed last year includes $1.7 billion for national parks, which includes money for climate mitigation projects like relocating trails from flood zones. Among other efforts, Glacier National Park biologists and staff at Joshua Tree National Park, who reintroduce bull trout into low-temperature waters, are removing shrubs and invasive species from cooler or wetter areas that are more likely to sustain Joshua trees. In Yosemite, rangers study forests to reduce the risk of wildfires.

Ms. Kodish said the poll by the National Parks Conservancy Association showed strong bipartisan support for preserving the park system, which she described as “American apple pie.”

He said Americans can change their daily decisions to fight climate change and protect parks: Dry clothes on a clothesline instead of in a dryer. Use public transport. Call on local representatives to move the country away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy.

“People have memories built on visiting these places,” he said. They see them as the lifeblood of our democracy; they see them as places they have reserved for common areas for our children and grandchildren.”

Researchers at Yellowstone hope to see an increase in fires, dying forests, expanding grasslands, more invasive plants and shallower, warmer waterways.

This week’s flooding will cut off the northern parts of the park, one of the country’s most visited natural wonders, to tourists for the remainder of the peak summer travel season. Authorities warned that more rain and flooding could be on the way.

By Wednesday morning, dark skies had opened over Livingston, Mont., a town of nearly 8,000 people that served as the main north gate to Yellowstone.

Cam Sholly, the park’s superintendent, said at a news conference late Tuesday that the entire park will remain closed for up to a week as authorities deal with damaged roads and collapsing bridges. However, entrances to the northern part of Yellowstone near Livingston and smaller tourist dependent towns will likely remain inaccessible until Halloween.

Mr Sholly described the flooding and mudslides caused by four days of record-breaking rains and melting snow as “whatever that means these days, a millennial event”.

“They seem to be happening more and more often,” he said, estimating that at least 10,000 people visited when the evacuations began.

Millions of tourists are drawn to the wilderness and active geysers in Yellowstone each year. spreads throughout More than two million acres in the northwest corner of Wyoming and in Montana and Idaho. in 2021 More than 4.8 million people visits, a significant increase over previous years.

The storm that caused flooding and mudslides this week started the weekend with two to three inches of rain. Combined with warming temperatures that melted 5.5 inches of snow, the rain caused flooding.

Hundreds of homes have been flooded in communities north of the park in Montana, including Gardiner and Cooke City, and these have been cut off from food and clean water supplies, officials said. flood waters knocked over water plant In Billings, the state’s largest city, residents are left with less than two days of supplies. On Wednesday, Montana’s deputy governor asked presidential major disaster declaration.

Mr Sholly said that even with a meter of snow remaining on Yellowstone’s mountains, some estimates suggest more warmth and rain in four to five days, increasing the likelihood of another series of floods.

Bill Berg, one of three commissioners for Park County, Mont., said he fears some hotels and restaurants in the area may close while the park’s north entrance is closed for the season. Summer is when most businesses make most of their money, he said.

He said this week’s flood was the worst the area has seen in 50 years. He watched the river swell and carry the grown trees upstream. On Wednesday, he stopped by the river to give an inventory of the wreckage left behind: log piles, pillows, toys, lockers, and a lone cross-country ski.

“It was tearing and roaring,” he said of his home in Gardiner. “Mother Nature doesn’t mess around.”

Contributed by reporting Alex Traub, Livia Albeck-Ripka, Henry Fountain and Christine Hauser. Alain Delaquériere contributed to research.