Ice and Glaciers

The glaciers are actually leaving us.

One of my favorite glaciers, the Sólheimajökull.

Glaciers are very important for the life on earth.

The glaciers are not the only things being eroded.

A satellite was launched into orbit to monitor melting glaciers.

I have swum in front of glaciers which have retreated so much.

Oceans come and go. Mountains come and go. Glaciers come and go.

And there's a volcano behind, which has glaciers at the very top.

95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking.

Icebergs are born when they calve off of glaciers or break off of ice shelves.

Here is some picture of Antarctica and a picture of Olympus Mons, very similar features, glaciers.

And so kind of thinking about scale, my most recent obsession is actually with glaciers of course.

And so I actually live in Canada now, so I've been visiting one of my local glaciers.

Unlike sea ice or pack ice, which form when the ocean freezes, glaciers are made of fresh water.

Now it's really hard to grasp the scale of these places, because as the glaciers one of the things is that places like Alaska and Greenland are huge, they're not normal landscapes but as the glaciers are retreating, they're also deflating,

And that's why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc.

Meteorologists and environmental scientists show the growth of major hurricanes and the recession over the years of many of the world's glaciers.

In the Himalayas, the third largest mass of ice at the top you see new lakes, which a few years ago were glaciers.

Anyway, last year, I heard about the Himalayas and the melting of the (Laughter) and the melting of the glaciers because of climate change.

95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking, and that's because the precipitation patterns and the temperature patterns are changing.

And this one's particularly interesting, because, of all the glaciers in North America, it receives the highest volume of human traffic in a year.

And with a population increasing as quickly as it is, and with the water supply from these glaciers because of climate change decreasing so much,

The one glacier up in Greenland that puts more ice into the global ocean than all the other glaciers in the northern hemisphere combined is the Ilulissat Glacier.

And so glaciers are these magnificent beings, and there's lots of reasons to be obsessed with them, but what I'm particularly interested in is in human glacier relations.

For thousands of years, these glaciers build layer upon layer of ice, constantly compressing, moving, adding snow, compressing, and moving again as they inch along like a frozen river.

And my urging is that when we think about environmental issues that we remember that it's not just about melting glaciers and ice caps, but it's also about our children as well.

And these cameras are positioned on rocks on the sides of the glaciers, and they look in on the glacier from permanent, bedrock positions, and they watch the evolution of the landscape.

But unfortunately, 95 percent of the glaciers in the Arctic are also receding right now to the point that the ice is ending up on land and not injecting any ice back into the ecosystem.

Now, Africa is the most tropical continent on the planet about 85 percent of it lies between Cancer and Capricorn and there aren't a lot of glaciers here, except on the high mountains here in East Africa.

In these images we see ice from enormous glaciers, ice sheets that are hundreds of thousands of years old breaking up into chunks, and chunk by chunk by chunk, iceberg by iceberg, turning into global sea level rise.

Yes the climate in Montana is getting warmer and drier, but Montana agriculture depends especially on irrigation from the snow pack, and as the snow is melting for example, as the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing that's bad news for Montana irrigation agriculture.

For several thousand years, global average temperatures stayed 15 degrees Fahrenheit, that's about 8 degrees celcius below what they're today, and mile thick glaciers covered much of North America, Europe, and Asia outside the ice covered regions, it was so dry that survival became difficult in most areas.

Then, if we added maps like the geology, the bedrock geology, and the surface geology, what the glaciers leave, if we make the soil map, with the 17 soil classes, that are defined by the National Conservation Service, if we make a digital elevation model of the topography that tells us how high the hills were, then we can calculate the slopes.

The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years two nine year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spend in their natural mother's womb now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother.