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It's hard to appreciate the scale of these places unless you have visited them. For glacier complexes in parts of Canada and Alaska, you are looking at big-cit
by bparsons 3y ago
It's hard to appreciate the scale of these places unless you have visited them.
For glacier complexes in parts of Canada and Alaska, you are looking at big-city sized areas of ice that are completely gone.
The really alarming thing is when you notice a big change after just a few years.
Everything down slope is impacted. Water volumes, soil moisture, vegetation, etc in the entire watershed can rapidly change once the glacier dries up. Farmers and municipal water authorities are most acutely aware of these changes, but it touches everything.
- jotaen 3y ago> It's hard to appreciate the scale of these places unless you have visited them. I think what’s especially hard to grasp from pictures is not just the areal loss, but the massive amount of volume that has vanished. For example, the Aletsch glacier, (at a length of 23 km, the biggest one in the Alps) has lost more than 100m of thickness in only 150 years. If you stand on its surface as it is today, it’s impressive to realise what a sheer amount of ice there used to be above your head and around you just a few decades ago.