Glancing at Glaciers
By: Tirzah Joy
Tags: Glaciers, Environmental Impact, College Essay, Global Warming

“Humph,” A sigh escapes a frustrated squirrel as he dreams about the last acorn he ate. He wants nothing more than to eat another acorn as he trudges across a white barren landscape. Blocks of ice surround the lone squirrel, reminding him of his growing hunger.

Waa! He breaks and slumps onto a nearby block of ice. The hunger is almost too much now.

All of a sudden, his ears twitch as he hears a distant rumble of ice crumbling along the white landscape. Curious, he begins to sniff the air for a clue to the cause. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. Taking his chances, he scurries towards the scene of the crime, wanting to know what happened.

As he approaches his new scene, he notes the towering white cliff above him and sniffs again. Nothing- wait- wait there’s something! His tail twitches in excitement as he sniffs again, his nostrils and buck teeth moving every so slightly.

Eureka! A smile sprawls across his face as he smells a faint earthy smell. He follows the smell and is met with the cold white glacier wall. It’s odd, there’s nothing out of the ordin-

Wait! He sees it- the acorn of his dreams- wedged in between a crack on the white wall of the cliff before him. He needs it- he must have it!

By now, you must now that I’m referring to our ever famous character from Ice Age- Scrat. We’ve seen him in this exact situation before and whether you’re a fan of the merchandise or not, you have to admit this character and his escapades make you laugh. What’s interesting though, is the science we’re presented in the movie series of Ice Age. In each of the different movies, we find our characters going through an Ice Age, Continental Drift, and much more. Ice is a guaranteed factor in these movies and so are glaciers if you take a notice at them.

Why is it important to consider the science we’ve been introduced to in these movies? However outrageous the movies seem, they do call to attention the importance of how. ice and glaciers leave massive impacts on our earth. So what exactly are glaciers? Why is it important to know how glacier’s work? Let’s dive in and see, why don’t we?

The exact moment in our earth’s history where glaciers covered earth on a more widespread scale than the ice ages in recent years is debated about. For example, in Global Weirdness, Climate Control mentions that this was up to 650 million years ago, whereas in Discovering Physical Geography, Arbogast mentions that this was 2.3 billion years ago. In his memoir, Extremes, Nick Middleton defines glaciers to be “slow moving masses or rivers of ice formed by the accumulation and compaction of snow” (34). Because of the heavy amount of snow and ice, everything was buried underneath them. Scientists referred to this as a snowball earth period through their studying of proxies.

What are proxies? Proxies are a natural record that provides an indirect measurement of ancient conditions. They’re imperfect because they cover different periods of history and different parts of the planet. Some proxies can be found and discovered within the glaciers and ice caps. They can be bubbles frozen in the ice preserving samples of air that were captured up to 800,000 years ago.

Interestingly, even though considered to be slow moving, the massive ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland raise sea level when it melts and flows into the ocean. These sheets contain more than 70% of all the freshwater on the planet. If all that water were to go in the ocean, sea level would rise about 200 feet (CC 77). But as the temperature rises, the glaciers move faster. Originally scientists thought that it was due to melting water pouring through cracks in the ice to lubricate the area, but it’s not.

What is happening is that warming seawater melts forges and ice where the glacier reaches into the sea, letting the tongues float free from where they had been grinding against the ocean floor. It’s like “easing up on the breaks of a car, so that the glacier moves faster, dumps more ice, and raises sea level” (CC 67). This leads to the reason why glaciers can move up to 12 inches per year in recent times (Arbogast

Speaking of cars, we can often forget that Global Warming is an issue in our day to day lives, so as we waste carbon fuels adding to the increasing risk of our planet getting hotter by trapped heat. And the warmer our planet gets, the likelihood of our glaciers shrinking increases. The result of which is sea level increasing and higher sea levels also mean storm surges that cause more destruction. In fact, in “2009 sea level was eight inches higher than it was in 1900” (Hertsgaard 89). Whether that is due to the production of carbon and greenhouses gasses is still being studied, but it does raise an alarm.

Noting mountain glaciers around the world, scientists have also noticed that the Alps have lost about half their ice since 1850. Mountain glaciers all over the planet are melting faster than they were a century ago as well. Since 1970, they have been shrinking at an accelerated rate, but that does not mean every glacier has been affected. Glaciers “grow and shrink depending on how much snow they add or ice they lose given over an amount of time (CC 89–92).”

According to that last fact, we can gain an appreciation for the power water has over us, especially in ice form. We might not think much about the consequences of glaciers shrinking around us, since it’s a given that ice melts. Yet taking in the repercussions discussed above makes us ever more so aware of the world around us. In fact looking at 2012’s map of active melting for Greenland’s glaciers on page 472 of Arbogast’s book is rather alarming.

Whether one believes in global warming or not, one should still consider what this means for our planet. What this means for the living populations on coast lines, for the environment, and for our animals. It’s not in my place to tell you to believe in it or not, but I do urge you, my readers, to at least research the facts yourselves.

Originally written on 4–18–2017

Posted here on 11–24–2020

Works Cited

Arbogast, Alan F. Discovering Physical Geography. Third ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons., 2014. Chapter 17. Print

Climate Central. Global Weirdness. First Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage, 2012. Print.

Hertsgaard, Mark. Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future. New York: Broadway, 1998. Print.

Midleton, Nick. Extremes: Surviving the World’s Harshest Environments. New York: New York, 2003. Print.