Kaldalonsjökull -- emergence of a hidden landscape

 

Satellite image of the 2025 Kaldalonsjökull.  This is a composite image with some rough joins.......

Two annotated close-ups from the same satellite imagery.

Sad though it is to comment on the death of a glacier, it is fascinating to record the emergence of a landscape that might not have seen daylight for more than a hundred thousand years.  This is a high resolution satellite image from Google Maps, taken this year.  If you zoom in even closer, you can see the individual boulders littering the ground surface.........

As I pointed out in a previous post, this is a complex landscape of rocky knolls, platforms controlled by flat-lying basalts, wide gorges and narrow meltwater channels.  Some of the undulating terrain still supports patches of dead ice -- elsewhere the ice has gone altogether, to be replaced nowadays just by a seasonal snowcover which changes from year to year in respose to precipitation totals and the directions of snowdrifting.  There are traces of pitted moraine, fluted moraine and ridged moraine, probably related to recent glaciological conditions -- ie ice wastage within the last few decades.

One of our photos from 1960.  The beginning of the end.......

Dave at the exit of the Morilla River from the glacier snout.