This animated image shows the disappearing glaciers at Montana's Blackfoot-Jackson Basin in Glacier National Park. The first image was taken on Aug. 17, 1984, while the second image was taken on Aug. 23, 2015. (NASA)

Soon, we'll have our answer to the question, "What happens when Glacier National Park no longer has glaciers?"

In the animated image above, you can see major glacial changes in Montana's Blackfoot-Jackson Basin from the summer of 1984 through August 2015. From one image to the next, the continued disappearance of the Jackson and Blackfoot glaciers is clear.

If you're hoping to see those glaciers before they're gone, time is running out. According to NASA's Earth Observatory, scientists have long believed .

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“People focus too much on the date, but the basic story is still true –these glaciers will be more or less gone in the next several decades,” saidDaniel Fagre, a research ecologist for the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Long before NASA's Landsat satellites captured the pair of images, these glaciers had begun to melt, NASA also said. In fact, the basin's glaciers shrank from 8.3 square miles in 1850 to 2.9 square miles in 1979. According to the USGS, the two glaciers , but by 2009, they were so small that they had retreated into separate valleys.

NASA's Earth Observatory also notes that the 2015 image includes a burn scar in the bottom-right corner, left behind by the Thompson fire that in late summer 2015. That inferno was started by lightning and quickly grew as it scorched land inside Glacier National Park.

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NASA Change: Arapaho Glacier, Colorado (1898)

The Aprapaho Glacier in Colorado in 1898. (NASA)