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Monday 18 October 2010

Water and Ice



Click to enlarge.

An amazing picture widely circulated by the National Geographic Magazine as a piece of wallpaper.  It's not just a fantastic photo -- but much more.  It shows an extraordinary relationship between water and ice.  It's very unusual to find standing water in a meandering stream channel like this.  The water has been much higher -- you can see the "strandlines" on the flanks of the channel.  Meltwater on a big glacier or ice sheet margin usually dives down through deep pits called moulins.

I'm not sure what's going on here -- maybe the whole of the base of the glacier is saturated, and the water level represents a water-table within the glacier.  That's seriously bad news.  A very unhealthy glacier indeed, and definitely on the way out.

2 comments:

Constantinos Ragazas said...

Amazing picture, Brian!

Looks like the work of 'intelligent ice' to me. Hm! Where have we heard this before! Maybe my paper, “The un-Henging of Stonehenge”? Ice, melt-water, Nature and Neolithic men is enough to explain the making of Stonehenge, and all other suchlike 'monuments'. It's all explained in my paper, in every detail.

Constantinos

(Brian, I know you wont post this. Just like I know Prof. Wainwright and others will continue to deny your 'glacier transport' theory.)

BRIAN JOHN said...

Always happy to agree to publishing comments, Kostas, as long as they are on topic and have something to contribute to the debate. I've given you plenty of space on this blog before, including links to your site. It's a free world, and you are free to publicise your ideas on your own site -- but I have blocked some of your comments in the past because they add nothing apart from repeating your theory of "intelligent ice" ad infinitum. As I have said before, PLEASE go and read some glaciology and glacial geomorphology texts -- and you can take my word for it (you probably won't) that there is not a single example from any modern glacial environment for anything like the mechanisms and stone emplacements that you propose. Ice is not intelligent -- it does wonderful things, but it obeys physical laws just as rivers, ocean currents and winds do. And I just do not know of any physical laws which can allow ice to do the things you want it to do. Please carry on this debate with others who might be interested, on your own site.