How much do we know about Stonehenge? Less than we think. And what has Stonehenge got to do with the Ice Age? More than we might think. This blog is mostly devoted to the problems of where the Stonehenge bluestones came from, and how they got from their source areas to the monument. Now and then I will muse on related Stonehenge topics which have an Ice Age dimension...
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Saturday, 16 October 2010
Oxford Gletscher
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.
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