It's not often that one gets the chance to name a sizeable piece of Planet Earth, but was reminded that my colleagues and I once got to name a glacier in East Greenland. It was previously unnamed, and we were the first to explore it.
This is another Google Earth image -- amazing quality. Click on it to enlarge. When we were there in 1962, the snout extended almost as far as the southern end of the trough -- there has been a phenomenal retreat since then. This is a surging glacier, so behaviour is somewhat erratic, but the retreat is certainly down to global warming.
Look at the trimline running down the western side of the valley -- it shows with perfect clarity where the ice edge used to be, with moraine (greyish) below it and frost-shattered scree (brown) above it. Here endeth the glaciology lesson for today.
No comments:
Post a Comment