Glaciers Today

Antarctica Glaciers
 
Antarctica contains 90% of the world’s ice and 70% of its fresh water.  Antarctica is covered by a cap of ice that flows slowly toward its 22,400 km /14,000 miles coastal, reaching the sea in high ice cliffs. Little more than 1% of the land is ice-free. With a estimated volume of 24 million cu m/5.9 million cu miles, the ice-cape has a mean thickness of 1,880m/6,170 ft and in places reaches depths of 5,000 m/16,000 ft or more.  Each annual layer of snow preserves a record of global conditions, and where no melting at the surface of the bedrock has occurred the ice can be a million years old.

Alaska Glaciers

Alaska is treeless plain, the ground of which is permanently frozen except for a surface melting in the summer that results in swampy conditions. The abundant snowfall provides the source for many glaciers. Summers are cool there, and winters, relatively mild. For half of the year the ground is covered with powdery snow that accumulates to depth of several feet. While the snow cover is thin, strong winds at times create extremely cold wind-chill temperatures.
 

Canada Glaciers

Flowing some 45 miles to its end in the Alsek River Valley, the Lowell Glacier-one of the largest among more than 2,000 in Kluane-was recently shattered into pincushion of ice needles by a surge, here surveyed by glaciologists studying the phenomenon. Several glaciers wind from the interior ice fields of the St. Elias into lower valleys at the mountain’s edge. Most of Kluane’s large glaciers periodically surge, advancing suddenly as ice pushes out of reservoir areas within them. Kluane, is a rock glacier-till and "scree" riding a submerged ice-core- that spills from a high "cirque" once filled with glacier ice. Summer meltwater makes pools like a paw prints on a glacier’s surface. Despite surges, glaciers have been in gradual retreat throughout the St. Elias in recent centuries, leaving a legacy of dramatic ice sculptured valleys. Conditions in the ice fields edges resemble those that existed at the fronts of the Pleistocene epoch’s continental ice sheets.
 

 
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