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Monday, 13 September 2010

Another lesson from nature.....




WHAT HAPPENS WHEN AN IRRESISTIBLE FORCE ENCOUNTERS AN IMMOVABLE OBJECT?

OK -- I am being very self-indulgent here, having got myself into a nostalgic frame of mind, and having looked back at all the maps and photos from East Greenland 1962. And I have been scanning over the incredible Google Earth images of East Greenland.

But I had to share these two images with whoever is interested. Click on the images to enlarge them. Two gigantic glacier collisions in the mountains south of Scoresbysund. They will have been very slow indeed, but the forces involved are enormous, with millions of tonnes of ice involved. The result? As always with collisions, chaos.....

2 comments:

  1. Beautiful pictures, Brian! These are awe-inspiring and point to both the beauty and intelligence of Nature! How do these relate to Stonehenge one may ask? My answer would be that Stonehenge was likely build by the intelligence of Nature ('smart ice') under the direction of Man. Just like so many other Neolithic structures were built. With Nature doing the 'heavy lifting' and men using such natural structures like earth mounts, caves and frozen lakes for their purposes.

    Constantinos

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  2. Hmmm -- intelligent ice? I don't think so. Intelligence implies choice -- and ice follows natural laws inexorably. Sometimes we might not fully understand how ice behaves, but as a scientist I think I prefer to think that that is because of defective understanding on our part. Our understanding of the principles of glaciology gets better all the time, but we are still not fully there.

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