Mission: Glacier education

As readers of this blog will know, it's one of my missions in life to ensure that members of the public are made aware of what ice can do -- and indeed has done in the past.  One does not need to be a glaciologist to have some awareness of how glaciers work and how they affect the landscape.  It's not that difficult, if you just try to steer clear of ice physics.........  

Of course, what ice CAN DO and what ice actually HAS DONE in particular circumstances are two different matters, and I don't deny that if we propose that ice has carried bluestone slabs a long way from their sources (for example)  then we must support that with hard documented evidence.

But there is a weird set of misconceptions out there, and some of them are shared by quite senior archaeologists.  Geoff Wainwright, for example, said in my hearing at a lecture that ice cannot possibly flow uphill, and cannot possibly have moved from west to east in the SW quadrant of the British Isles.  Mike Parker Pearson has said -- more than once -- that the glacial transport thesis is "dead in the water" because there are no widespread glacial deposits on Salisbury Plain.  Tim Darvill and Mike Pitts have said something similar, citing the apparent lack of a continuous erratic train from source to dumping ground........

All of the above are pieces of nonsense, of course, and those who are lucky enough to be still alive need to do some serious reading.  To help people like said archaeologists, I wrote "The Ice Age" for Collins a long time ago, containing a sort of layman's guide to glaciology.  I was reminded of this the other day when I was assembling some old book jackets for my archive, and found that exactly 25 years ago the Norwegian Glacier Museum published two small booklets (jackets above) which were based on two of the chapters from the book.   They are quite short -- 16 pp and 24 pp respectively.   The booklets are still in print, as far as I know, and I am going to try to get them onto Kindle or onto Researchgate where they can be easily accessed.

Watch this space......

PS.. Happy to relate that last night I managed to work out how to scan and get one of the booklets onto Researchgate.  So there it is, completely free at the point of use.  Enjoy!  The other will follow.........

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262414916_The_Birth_and_Death_of_Glaciers

PPS.  I have managed to scan and convert the other booklet too.  Here it is.  Now nobody has any excuse for being naive about the workings of glaciers.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262414820_How_Glaciers_Move