Climate-Threatened Marmot Research Turns to 'Fat Marmot Week' for Survival

While not directly human casualties, the marmot die-off signals broader climate impacts affecting water security for downstream human communities dependent on Colorado River snowmelt.

High in the Colorado Rockies, a decades-long vigil over yellow-bellied marmots has met a winter of reckoning: two-thirds of a closely studied population perished in their burrows, not from predation or disease, but from the absence of snow that should have sheltered them. Climate change, researchers say, made this snow drought fourteen times more likely, and the loss echoes far beyond the alpine slopes — the same snowpack that failed these animals is the lifeblood of the Colorado River Basin, sustaining farms and communities across the American West. Now the scientists who have kept watch sinc

Climate-Threatened Marmot Research Turns to 'Fat Marmot Week' for Survival

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