Glaciers, Ice and Global Warming Essay

For many years, I have always wondered how Michigan was shaped. I did not realize that water could have such a huge impact on the way Michigan was made. From doing research, I recognized that there has been four Ice Ages on Earth. The last Ice Age, Pleistocene Epoch began and ended two million years to 12,000 years. At this time, hot and cold temperatures swayed and glaciers receded to advance into the interglacial periods. In the United States, and around the world glaciers have carved out our landscape, making what the world is today.

Global warming persists as one of the world’s biggest issues today that is causing several problems that include the world’s severe climate and rising sea levels while possibly being the main cause as to why all of mankind could go extinct. This global crisis is known as the steady increase in the world’s average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans that are proven to be permanently changing the world’s climate (Live Science, 2014). This phenomenon is strongly evident as Earth’s temperature has also increased by 2 degrees Celsius since the last century. As a result of this, Canadian glaciers are melting at a higher rate of 2 to 3 feet than of what it was a decade before (Lerner, 2014). All astoundingly happening while the Artic Canadian permafrost has begun to melt (Davidson,2015). The state of this issue in Canada does not seem to be improving as validated through both the scientific evidence as well as the blatant and irrefutable observable evidence.

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.

The progressing widespread of melting glaciers allows rapid change in Earth’s climate change. The melting of glaciers has forced pressure on the ground, causing the land to bounce back from Earth’s

Glaciers is familiar to most people, thinking as a big rigid piece of ice. However, under pressure, glaciers act like a soft plastic. They can bend and flow downhill like slow-motion river of ice. However, ice caps, ice sheets and really any masses of ice which remain year round are also considered glaciers. For typical glacier, snowfall builds up on its surface. Overtime, all the layers of snow press down on the layers beneath compacting the snow crystals into ice. This ice form the main body of the glaciers. Glaciers gain ice from snowfall. They lose ice through surface melting, melting from beneath and in some cases, by gradually flowing into lakes or oceans and breaking off into icebergs. In winter, new snow weighs down of the glacier pushing

Changes in land formations during the ice ages happened in different ways, but most of them relate to the process of glaciation. During the Ice Age, glaciation, the process of being covered by ice sheets took place over giant land masses and entire continents which is known as “continental glaciation”. As this large scale glaciation took place, changes in land formations occurred, that of which are uncommon to be formed today. They include moraines, drumlins, kames, eskers, and Kettle Lakes. Most of the evidence that was discovered has to do with the Earth’s geography, the physical features of the Earth. The ways these glaciers affected the landscape were separated into three different categories: erosion, transportation and deposition.

Glaciers are a dynamic perennial accumulations of ice that, together with ice sheets, represent a significant portion of Earth's water and a volatile element in the changing climate. Although sea level rise is a significant consequence of glacial change, the instability poses numerous hazards, though the impacts are not as widespread. Glaciers are continuously changing in response to changes in temperature, intermittent precipitation levels and other geological processes. Glacier ice crystals form slowly through the metamorphism of snow to "firn" crystalline, known as bubbly ice. Glaciologists recognize nine types of glaciers: continental ice sheets, ice caps, ice fields, piedmont glaciers,

Second, water expands into ice. The hydrogen molecules in water strengthen. Then, the molecules become locked into a specific position, which creates ice. While ice may not seem essential to life, it is if we wish to live as we are currently. Luckily, water is stored in ice, which is preventing coastal cities from flooding. Unfortunately, much of the world’s ice is slowing breaking apart, which can cause drastic sea level changes in the next 50 years. Cities such as, New York, and the coastal parts of Florida are at risk. If these cities flooded, it would cause mass migration to various parts of the U.S., which can result in various ways. Therefore, ice is essential to our current style of living.

Earth has experienced many episodes of dramatic climate changes with different periods in earth history. There have been periods during which the entire planet has been covered in ice and at another time it has been scorchingly hot and dry. In this regards, earth has experienced at least three major periods of long- term frigid climate and ice ages interspersed with periods of warm climate. The last glacial period which current glaciers are the result of it, occurring during the last years of Pleistocene, from approximately 110,000 to 10,000 years age (Clayton, 1997). Indeed, glaciers present sensitive indicators of climate change and global warming and by estimating and monitoring the dynamic evolution of these ice masses, several

In recent years, the controversial subject of global warming has been more predominantly brought to our attention. Is the threat of global warming real? Is it man-made or is this just a natural cycle of earth? Does it really affect earth’s inhabitants? Should action be taken against it? If so, what kind and to what extent? It cannot be only a coincidence that the alarmingly rapid climate change coincides perfectly with the increased amount of pollutants that humans release into the environment. The once stable climate has in recent years begun to skyrocket, thus altering the delicate structure of earthly life. This proves to be hazardous to the future of the planet; some people worry that many of the resources the environment provides that

The Arctic is global warming’s canary in the coal mine. It is a highly sensitive area which is profoundly affected by the changing climate. The average temperature in the Arctic is rising twice as fast as elsewhere in the world (nrdc.org). Because of this, the ice cap is getting thinner, melting away, and rupturing. Here is an example of this; the largest ice block in the Arctic, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, had been around for 3000 years before it started cracking in 2000 (nrdc.org) By 2002, the Ward Hunt has cracked completely through and had started breaking into smaller pieces. The melting ice caps are affecting the earth and its inhabitants in many ways. In this paper, the following concepts and subjects will be

One of the effects of global warming is the polar ice caps’ melting. Scientists have been researching and examining the polar ice caps for a long time and they have come to the conclusion that the thin ice sheets are slowly wasting away. They have also found out that Greenland’s glaciers are getting smaller and smaller. Places around the globe that use to be covered in ice and snow are now showing more green terrain as the years go on and as the winter months grow warmer. The polar ice caps are melting more and more due to higher global temperatures. This is really bad because the ice caps “reflect and help regulate the Earth’s temperatures.”

Glacial ice is created through the annual deposition of snow that piles up in continuous sequences due to vast plateaus (Bethan, 2014). There are 2 main ice sheets present on Earth today. The first one is located in Greenland and dates up to 125,000 years ago while the other is the Antarctic ice sheet that dates up to 800,000 years ago (Ruddiman, 2013). Ice thickness can provide clues about the local precipitation and thicker layers corresponds to greater snowfall which tells us about global temperatures due to the fact that more snow tends to accumulate at the poles during global warm spells. However, majority of the data about past climate is gained from ice cores, are produced when the ice sheets are drilled on the major axis of growth at about 4-5 inches in diameter and up to lengths of 1m in order to get a vertical core that can be stored for analysis. Ice cores are not limited to polar regions, they can be found on 6 of the 7 continents of Earth and can range in thickness from mountain glaciers to continental ice sheet (Ruddiman, 2013) (Figure 2). However the 2

An Ice Age is a period of geologic time in which the Earth’s climate sees a dramatic drop in temperatures. This basically means that it is a lot cooler than it was in different parts of earth’s geologic history. As a matter of fact, earth is believed to be in the middle of a glaciation period currently because of our polar ice sheets. As we know it today there were about six ice ages that have occurred throughout the history of the earth. Glaciation periods have helped shape the earth as we know it today and has helped humanity progress down its evolutionary track. Though it is agreed upon that several ice ages have occurred during earth history, the cause of these cycles is still a mystery waiting to be solved.

Over the recent decades, the Earth’s warming climate has had a tremendous effect on glaciers. Glaciers contain snow that has turned into ice after snow has layered on and froze because they are formed on the coldest parts of the Earth. In order for glaciers to maintain their size, a greater amount of snow has to fall each year than the amount that melts off (Help Save Nature). Since enough snow isn’t falling to replace the ice that is melting off, the glaciers are diminishing. Everyday ice all over the world gets shrinks in size, which threatens the lives of arctic animals. Arctic ice has thinned and shrunk dramatically over the past couple decades. The melting rate of the glaciers is speeding up. The extent of arctic ice “declined by about 10 percent in the past 30 years”(Glick). Ice naturally melts during the summer time, but the amount of ice that has melted is not all from nature. It is over the average amount of summer ice melt. Some countries depend on the ice that naturally melts off of glaciers for fresh drinking water, agricultural use, and some even depend on it for electricity power. “The famed snows of Kilimanjaro have melted more than 80 percent since 1912” (Glick). Some glaciers are melting so fast that researchers believe that they could disappear completely in upcoming years. For example National