ICE COVERED
About 200,000 square miles of the State of Alaska are covered with a permanent veneer of ice.
An, oddly enough,most of those ice fields are in the southern portion of the state rather than in the frigid northerly areas. Have you every wondered why that should be?
I doubt if you have. It’s never bothered me but I have often wondered how the cruise ships going north to Sitka seemed to have plenty of glaciers dumping tons of ice into the already frigid waters. I wondered which might be waiting o be seem in the rest of the huge state -further north.
The quality of the snow,I find ,determines what kind of ice will develop and how much.. It difficult to accept the fact that parts of Alaska get more annual rainfall than some locations on the Amazon River in Brazil can expect...a station called Manaus, for one. And it is also true that some coastal areas of Alaska get less annual rainfall that folks in El Paso in arid west Texas. Rainfall – and snow – are less frequent in some areas of Alaska...more in others, and much depends on how it falls.
If the snow fall and melts. Then the flakes pack down and recrystallize into solid glacial ice. Gravity moves the growing mass of ice down the mountainsides, across chasms and into valleys and flat fields, digging deeply into the earth’s crust on it’s relentless way to the sea And ,all the while new snows, melting and recrystallizing are adding yet another layer or two on the top along the way.
Each glacier is a living laboratory for the study of fibers, form and forces.
Some of the glaciers are positioned so as to be relatively easy for tourists to visit their edges. The Matanuska near Palmer, Worthington and Columbia near Valdez and Mendenhall about twelve miles from Juneau. Within fifty miles of the capital city, there are sixteen tidewater glaciers and you can witness huge chunks dropping off and forming bergs in the cold sharing he bay with seals, whales, and salmon. Bald eagles soar overhead and it is easy to think you might have traveled back into the Ice age. When bare rock appear in the spent path of the mighty glacier, lichen and moss form on the surface and soils and eventually support a rim of willows, alders, - in other areas – spruces and hemlocks.
Glaciers are a wondrous show of force which can be witnessed first hand by visitors. You can watch from a distance, or you can walk across their expanses and marvel at the fact that they’re, even then, moving on a steady, relentless, unstoppable trek toward the sea. Under the huge slabs of packed layers of ice, as you move about in comparative ease, there is little realization of the tremendous power on which you may be riding. The weight of the ice is pressing into the ground below, taking large rocks into it own skin to better scrape, scrape and smash its way to the shore overcoming any obstacles and leaving behind new rivers, new lakes, gorges and fantastic scars on basic rock which illustrate the tremendous force which is so unseen, and rarely felt, when you walk across the expanses of solid, seemingly steadfast ice.
Glaciers are truly one of the world’s many wonders!
A L.M. March 18, 2003 [c-568wds]
