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Saturday 14 March 2020

Supphellebre regenerated glacier, Norway -- now disappeared.


In 1884, at the end of the Little Ice Age in which many small glaciers advanced, the Supphelle Glacier in Norway was a substantial steep outlet glacier pouring ice down from the Jostedalsbre ice cap on the high plateau above.  The glacier was continuous down onto the valley floor at about 200 ft above sea level.  This was by far the lowest ice snout in Norway.


This is how I remember it from my early visits in the 1960s and 1970s.  The bedrock "lip" over which the ice poured was now exposed, but there was a continuous feed of ice fragments tumbling down to create one of the most famous "regenerated glaciers" in the world.  You could not walk on it without risking life and limb, because there were ice avalanches all the time, with huge blocks of ice sometimes landing on the braided stream bed at the glacier snout.


A satellite image of the situation today.  Sixty years since my first visits, the regenerated glacier has disappeared completely.  The icefall at the ice cap edge has also disappeared, giving way to a smooth and somewhat unspectacular ice edge from which just a few ice fragments now fall, to be melted away rather quickly in the stream bed down below.

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PS.  I found another photo from October 2019, showing that there is in fact just a small patch of dead ice left down at the foot of the slope -- virtually covered by rockfall debris.  One more hot summer, and even that will be gone.......





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