Glaciers And Climate Change

A glacier is a large body of ice that moves slowly across land and are formed by there being a higher snow gain rather than a snow melt. Glaciers move by a small amount of ice melting and the glacier sliding. Glaciers can help and destroy the landscape in front of them but they can also shape the land into something amazing. Glaciers were once present in Minnesota thousands of years ago and played a massive role on the landscape we live on today, and as they melted they left behind large amounts of water and formations.

When President Taft created Glacier National Park in 1910, it had about 150 glaciers. Since then, the number has decreased to less than 30, and those remaining have shrunk by two-thirds. Dr. Daniel Fagre (2015) predicts that within the next 30 years most if not all of the park's glaciers will melt. Glacier National Park is not the only place effected. The snow on Kilimanjaro has melted more than 80 percent since 1912. Glaciers at the Garhwal Himalaya in India are melting so fast that researchers believe that most central and eastern Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. Greenlands coastal glaciers have melted to the point of no return. “These peripheral glaciers and ice caps can be thought of as colonies of ice that are in rapid decline,

Remote sensing has become a very valuable tool for documenting the response of glacier to changing climate (Bamber and Kwok, 2003; Kuhn, 2007; Pellikka, 2007; Solomon et al, 2007) because the rugged terrain, inaccessibility and legendary poor weather of glacier areas has resulted in relatively few field- based studies. Indeed, in order to use glaciers and their changes as indicators of climate change, or as an early warning signal for sea level rise, remote sensing is the only tool to provide glacier change information from all the continents and from a large number of glaciers and ice sheets. On the other hands, because space borne and airborne remote sensing data provide superior cost- effective and area effective data and methods for monitoring the glaciers and their changes, part of this monitoring can be carried out by it.

The most significant event to indicate climate change is the melting of the polar ice caps. The area of sea covered by the Arctic ice at the North Pole has shrunk by 10% in recent decades, and the thickness of the ice above the water has decreased by about 40%. On the other side of the world, the ice sheet above the Antarctic continent has become unstable. Glaciers are retreating all around the world. Since 1979, glaciers in the European Alps have lost about one-fifth of their volume, and the loss rate has clearly accelerated since the 1980s.

A glacier occurs when the climate of an area is so cold that new snow does not completely melt each summer and more snow is added in the winter. After many winters the accumulation of this snow becomes compact and re-crystallizes, thus forming a glacier. Currently, glaciers cover about ten percent of the Earth's surface. Yet, in the past, glaciers covered much more land and were thousands of meters thick. (Tierney)

~ Glaciers are formed when snow builds up for several years from snowfall that exceeds snow melt. Over time, as new snow compresses the existing snow, the weight causes the snow underneath to turn to ice. The hardening effect is similar to what happens when you pack a snowball in your hand. The pressure from additional layers of snow builds for up to thousands of years. Glaciers can grow and shrink as a result of changes in the amount of snowfall

Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist, studied a glacier on Mount Baker, in Washington State. The glaciers are melting, as the planet becomes warmer. “At the rate it is losing mass, it won’t make it 50 years,” said Pelto. Glaciers from Mount Baker and the North Cascades are getting smaller. Over the past thirty years, seven glaciers have melted. An estimate was made that the 116 glaciers that they studied in Alaska have lost a total of 75 billion metric tons of ice. There were 150 glaciers in Glacier National Park in 1850. Now, there are only 25."They are losing volume at a faster rate than ever before," Pelto said. "If you cannot sustain a glacier at a place like this in the Lower 48 states, there is no hope."

Climate change is causing glaciers to melt. In the video it says “when the ocean gets warmer it swells on top of that glaciers and ice sheets are melting”. This is important because it shows glaciers are melting because the ocean is too warm. This

Glaciers have helped define the topography of earth for many years. A glacier is a large mass of ice that has been compacted of snow and ice for a long period of time. The ice age we will be focusing on is the Pleistocene era, which was “a period that began about 2.5 million years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago” (513). This was the most recent ice age where it helped formed our present-day lands. During this time, ice covered about 19 million square miles which was about 1/3 of earth’s land surface (515). Many parts of all the continents were covered with ice and that had a great effect on our topography due to the glaciers it created.

Even though some of the links could not found, I still learned some cool and disturbing facts about glaciers. For example, ice bergs are nicknamed "rivers of ice" because they constantly move like rivers but at a much slower pace. Also if the ice bergs keep melting at the rate that they are, sea levels will rise and cause major damage and cause natural disasters like, flooding. Also the freshwater that's stored within the ice bergs would mix into the saltwater and led to a very limited availability of freshwater. Global warming is a major factor in the melting of the ice bergs and it's up to man to get this problem under

Many locations around the world in places where its snows throughout the year temperature stays cold and frosty. This will cause snow not to melt but sometimes creates a firn. When the snow gets suppressed deeper in the snowpack it can turn in to a glacier ice. “Glacier is massive, long-lasting, moving mass of ice compacted snow and ice” (Thompson, 2007). These gigantic moving mass can only be made on land where the quantity of snow is more abundant than the snow that had previously melted in the summer. Glaciers are influenced by geologic forces, temperature changes, and snowfall (RioLearn, 2016). There are two types of glaciers the first type is an alpine glacier and the

Glaciers are a huge patch of ice. When snow stays in the same place for a really long time, enough snow will accumulate and turn into ice. Gravity helps move this huge pack of ice because the ice slowly flows over land. Continental glaciers can be found in Antarctica and Greenland. Glaciers were once present in Minnesota thousands of years ago, and as they retreated they left behind large amounts of glacial meltwater and various landforms still present today.

The alpine glaciers are melting with temperature increases of 2°C, twice the global average. This effects water resources by altering vegetation.

Glaciers are one of the most fundamental phenomenon on the planet, and much of their purpose and impact on earth has been well documented and published. Ice sheets, Ice Caps and Glaciers trap nearly 90% of the world's fresh water, and are replenished by snowfall each year. Their existence on this planet dates back 650,000,000 years and yet they are always moving, always shifting and always melting. Before, human existence and even during the brief era of humans, ice dominated all of the earth's landmass and have regulated, created and altered many of the landscapes around the world.

For example , in Montana the ice caps are melting at extremely fast rates . In 1910 there were 150 glaciers but now there are less than 30 and