Global Land Glacier thread for all land ice outside of Greenland and Antarctica

[sokolow]

Glacial landscapes on the Sierra crest; Mount Dana from the trail down to Saddlebag lake in Twenty Lakes basin. North Peak from Steelhead Lake & above Shamrock Lake.

It was, unsurprisingly, hazy and warm. Lots of active fires.

[sokolow]

It was, unsurprisingly, hazy and warm. Lots of active fires.

Had a good view of the firefighting aircraft making runs on the Tenaya fire from Glacier Point. The Valley was dang near socked in with smoke as we went through up to Tioga pass.

Our hike to Cathedral Lakes and up the domes we nixxed the latter half of on account of an active-though-managed fire still smoldering on our route. Hoped to get some good vistas of the escarpment from down south of Bishop later that week but it was just too dang smoky.

We also saw lots of pikas!

[A-L-E-K]

sokolow, on 29 Aug 2015 - 5:57 PM, said:sokolow, on 29 Aug 2015 - 5:57 PM, said:

In other news its been a extremely melty year for glaciers in the pac-NW;

http://blogs.agu.org/fromaglaciersperspective/2015/08/20/disastrous-year-for-north-cascade-glacier-mass-balance-snowice-economy/

Pelto reports that at his study sites they measured an average ablation of 7.5cm of ice per day

While I haven't seen anything pop up about the alps -- austrian measurements come in in the fall from ZAMG -- its not gonna be a good one. I wonder how it'll compare to summer of 2003.

 

bummer but not surprising given then 1-2 punch of a warm/dry winter and long hot summer, IIRC they had been doing relatively well (relative to similar lat. glaciers without oceanic influences) after the recent heavy snowfall winters back into the aughts

[sokolow]

Add another one to the list of prehistoric bows broken, removed, or looted from melting glacial ice

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-artifacts-indict-20151005-story.html

According to the post, Burd was hiking down a mountain in the area Aug. 19, 2014, when Bourne shouted that "he had discovered a Native American bow sticking out from the ice and rock in what remained of a glacier."

"He immediately procured some stone tools to start chopping out the ice around the bow to extract it," Burd's post said.

[sokolow]

They got him after the pics got posted to the hiking club blog and started things rolling. Recovered some 30,000 artifacts from the guy's house. Also a coupla four years back he was fined one million dollars for burning down 7,000 acres of Inyo national forest,

Definitely a real winner.

[Geos]

Love the thread Sokolow!

Took awhile to read everything. Some very fascinating posts you made. I know a lot about glaciers, and I know more interesting things about them now. Never knew there was glaciers in Costa Rica for example or in southern California.

 

Reading and seeing all the artifacts that are coming out of the glacial ice is really cool.

 

Some much valuable information in this thread - it's like a textbook.

[Geos]

Found this new article to be quite interesting. Pakistan's glaciers in the Karakoram Range (Kashmir) in the northeastern section of the country, have the tendency to surge 100 times faster than most glaciers.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3334951/Watch-glaciers-PULSE-surge-melt-Time-lapses-filmed-SPACE-25-years-changing-ice-just-one-second.html

 

 

The theory is that favorably high winter snowfall and lower summer temperatures in the last 25 years has helped these glaciers hold their own and in some cases grow.

 

[Cheeznado]

http://www.thedailystar.net/backpage/himalayan-lakes-expanding-dangerously-179077

[Geos]

I was looking around at the Maroon Bells area near Aspen, CO on Google Earth and I noticed a couple unique geologic features, two rock glaciers.

 

 

If you look closely down valley of the rock glacier on the left side of the image you can see lateral, medial, and terminal moraine in the landscape.

 

For a closer look go to these coordinates to Maroon Bells: N 39°04'31.83", W 106°59'16.40"

 

Not your typical glacier; a rock glacier is a unique type. Made up of mostly rock and sediment and not a lot of ice. They move very slowly due to all the lack of ice.

 

This is what a rock glacier is according to geology.com
 

 

A rock glacier is a mass of rock, ice, snow, mud, and water that moves slowly down a mountain under the influence of gravity. The rock glacier might consist of a mass of ice covered by rock debris, or it might consist of a mass of rock with interstitial ice. A gradient of compositions between these two states also exists.

Unlike an ice glacier, rock glaciers usually have very little ice visible at the surface. If you are on the ground looking at one from a short distance away, it might not look at all like a glacier. The very slow movement, typically between a few centimeters and a few meters per year, also helps hide the rock glacier's identity.

 

or

 

 

link: http://geology.com/articles/rock-glacier/

 

Nice picture of the rock glacier to the northeast of the main peak of Maroon Bells. If you didn't have the moraine to give it away, you wouldn't even think this was more than a talus slope.

 

 

Front of it.

 

 

All the rock and sediment that lie on top helps insulate the ice. Compared to your typical Alpine Glacier of mostly ice, this is a type of glacier that will survive longer in our changing climate.

[sokolow]

Neat stuff geos!

[Sugarloaf1989]

Yankee Boy Basin, Colorado has quite a few rock glaciers.

 

http://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/211/1/167.abstract?ijkey=732426ccddb6a602055fcb97a876316c9f02ce74&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha

[sokolow]

Two items:

First a post talking with Lonnie Thompson about salvage coring & long-term storage of ice records:

http://glacierhub.org/2015/05/13/melting-glaciers-changing-careers/

Second a nifty set of links that's been making the rounds about Jill Pelto's environmental art;

http://www.jillpelto.com/gallery/

http://bangordailynews.com/2015/12/30/living/artistic-scientist-illustrates-effects-of-climate-change/

Snippet from the UMaine profile:

Undergraduate Jill Pelto’s thesis combines her two loves: that of science and art. Her “scientific art” integrates her research on the devastating effects of climate change through the intricate process of screen printing. Jill’s creativity stems from both sides of her family; her mother Julie Brownlee, a creative quilter, and father Mauri Pelto, a scientist and UMaine alumnus, have both inspired her to use art to communicate with the world. Their influence has encouraged Jill’s interest in a dichotomy of art and science, through which she tell the story of a global issue close to her heart–that of climate change. Since the age of 16, Jill has had the opportunity to witness glacial retreat first hand. For seven consecutive field seasons, she has accompanied her father on trips to the North Cascade Glaciers of Washington State. In addition, Jill has been on excursions to the Antarctic Dry Valleys and the Falkland Islands, all of which have motivated her to creatively express the anthropogenic changes she has seen in the natural environment.

Pelto’s work was recently featured at the UMaine Art Department’s senior studio art exhibit entitled “The Ghosts of Carnegie Hall”, where her art will remain on display until January 22, 2016. Luckily for the UMaine community, Pelto has decided that she will be returning to UMaine in the Fall of 2016 to begin her graduate research.

http://mainejournal.umaine.edu/communication-of-science-through-art/

This one depicts glacier mass loss in the Cascades;

...

This one shows glacier mass loss, sea level rise, and temperature increase

...

All neat stuff and there's more to see in her gallery and in the UMaine profile. Will have to browse and see what she has for weather nerds; the famous Edward Tufte supercell shows what might be a starting point for a scientist-artist who wants to move beyond elegance of explanation:

I think she could do some wicked cool things with analyses drawn in the old school, and with soundings. I would love to see how she'd approach it. If the Pelto name is familiar, her father Mauri Pelto is a prolific glaciologist.

...

What I think is worth noting is that the link between scientific illustration and fine art, so to speak, is so often thought of as a distinction when as has come up in this thread re: romantic landscape art, Bradford Washburn, &c. that distinction is a convenience and the link grounds a powerful tradition of exchange between artistic and scientific ways of seeing, observing, creating and presenting data, especially in the American west -- Muybridge, Thomas Moran and William Holmes e.g.

Here's a couple of Holmes joints, for fun. All via wiki.

Panorama from Point Sublime, illustration of the Grand Canyon by Holmes, published in Clarence E. Dutton, The Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District (1882), sheet XV.

...

Sunset on the Kanab Desert. From the brink of the Permian Cliff - a Permian butte in the foreground, the Vermillion Cliffs in the distance, and the Jurassic white sandstone in the extreme background. Grand Canyon District, Mohave County, Arizona. (Holmes, 1877)

[sokolow]

Greenland, but lots of neat stuff on salavge archaeology in and around Nuuk & elsewhere

http://remains.eu/field%20sites.html

[sokolow]

Siberian puppies frozen in permafrost from 12.4kya

http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0613-ancient-puppys-brain-is-well-preservedas-dog-bares-its-teeth-after-12400-years/

Cool findings for human-canine coevolution

[A-L-E-K]

dogs are just the best

[Jonger]

Not a dog guy, but I'm fascinated with the canine-human coevolution.

 

Dogs evolve due to breeding over as little as a few generations. Dogs from 100 years ago, look very different from today.

 

I'll be interested to see if they can determine a genetic link to any modern breed.

[A-L-E-K]

Not a dog guy

 

 

ban

[Jonger]

ban

 

Not a pet guy... So don't accuse me of being a cat person either.

[sokolow]

Not a dog guy, but I'm fascinated with the canine-human coevolution.

Dogs evolve due to breeding over as little as a few generations. Dogs from 100 years ago, look very different from today.

I'll be interested to see if they can determine a genetic link to any modern breed.

Probably there's multiple episodes of independent canine-human coevolution in multiple locations. So while the nerds who study this stuff are pretty confident in the evidence for what we'd call canis familiaris being present 15kcal BP, there's other examples from 33kcal BP and some argue even earlier evidence of divergence between dogs, wolves, and their last common ancestor. All complicated by the fact that unto this day dogs, wolves, and 'yotes can and do reproduce with one another. "Canis soupus" is a popular nickname for the dogwolf coywolf 'yote creatures that have become interesting to biologists and land managers of late.

I should post up the pic of the ancient siberian hunting dog burial where its people interred it with a mammoth bone in its jaws

Our ancestors didn't do breeds like the AKC: they ended up in alliances so to speak with landraces of different-shaped dogtypes that offered unique skills and advantages for whatever their archaic human selves were up to: coursing, tracking, guarding. Later herding, ratting, hauling, and so on. Divergent ancient dogtypes are attested archaeologically. So in that vernacular it doesn't really make sense to say "azawakh" or a "greyhound" so much as "coursing dog that hunts by sight"

This is some weird egyptian gamepiece from 5000 years ago; I doubt that the dogs it depicts bear a special genetic relationship to for example modern english greyhounds but we could course deer or gazelles or rabbits with them just the same. Fanciers say the azawakh is an ancient breed; really what that means when we're talking about dogs is that they're geographically and hence genetically isolated from other dog populations and also wolves.

[sokolow]

I freakin love dogs but its OK if you don't

Edit: Lookit how good that ancient pharaoh-hound dog thing is, all with its ears and the dead god dang gazelle in its jaws. Good hound.

[sokolow]

here's a fair recent longread on ancient dogs

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wolf-became-dog/

edit thats got a paywall doesn't it

free preview of significant part of article

https://books.google.com/books?id=SGAQCwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT42&ots=i6Hve2O_eU&dq=%22Yet%20despite%20having%20lived%20and%20worked%20with%20the%20scientists%20for%20seven%20years%2C%20the%20wolves%20retain%20an%20independence%20of%20mind%20and%20behavior%20that%20is%20most&pg=PT42#v=onepage&q&f=true

[sokolow]

Its what we've all been waiting for -- the 2015 Austrian glacier monitoring report, fresh and hot in your copy of Bergauf! the magazine of the Austrian Alpine Club.

The glaciers are melting.

Of the 92 glaciers observed, 88 were in retreat, three stationary, and one recorded an advance.

Figure 3: The average change in length and the quantity for advancing (black), stationary (grey), and retreating (background color) glaciers out of those observed, from 1960 to 2015.

here's hoping for white peaks and plenty of ski powder in the yodelzone during the coming months.

Welp. 2014-2015 was a pretty melty year for Austrian glaciers, racking up levels of retreat on par with the blowtorch summer of 2003. Indeed, temperatures in the ablation season were 2.6C above climo, whereas the notorious 2003 season was by comparison a mere 1.9C above longterm climo. 2015 recorded the largest departure for this station network for since observations began in 1901.

Temperatures at alpine weather stations during the entire yearlong observation period were overall 2.3C warmer than climo average, with only one month recording a slight negative departure. Enduring high pressure and thin warm-season snowfall predominated.

Photo comparison of the Pasterze from the 20th C and in 2012.

[sokolow]

This year marks the 125th glacier report! Citizen science!

[sokolow]

This is just, its super cool. Via RTWL:

http://washingtonlandscape.blogspot.com/2016/08/bjornstad-lake-sacajawea-flood-bar.html

 

Ice age floodscapes. See link in the comments for the whole channel.

[sokolow]

Its that time of year again folks! Time for the preliminary report on worldwide glacier mass balance via our old pals Mauri Pelto and the World Glacier Monitoring Service.

http://blogs.agu.org/fromaglaciersperspective/2017/02/17/state-alpine-glaciers-2016-negative-37th-consecutive-year/

 

*drumroll*

 

The glaciers continue to melt at rates which are unprecedented on a millenial timescale

[sokolow]

Now we await the next issue of Bergauf and the report from the ÖAV's glacier research section!!

[chubbs]

This google earth site generates landscape time lapse videos covering the past 32 years for tracking glaciers, shore lines, tropical rain forests etc.

https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/#v=64.06916,-16.3899,9.898,latLng&t=0.92

 

[Jack Frost]

 

Very interesting data as to natural climate change that has been going on since the beginning of time - thanks chubbsy. 

[sokolow]

Upthread awhile back I mentioned the Norwegian ice patches with the prehistoric hunting blind and leather shoe, and the researchers were cutting a tunnel into thr ice mass at Juvfonne -- paper out with detailed results on dating the samples retrieved:

http://www.the-cryosphere.net/11/17/2017/tc-11-17-2017-relations.html

The upshot is, complex layering notwithstanding, the stratigraphy is preserved, and the oldest ice dated goes back to ~7500 cal BP. There may well be older ice.

Neat things: in this pic there's the lightish grey margin around the ice patch -- the border with the darker terrain is its former maximum extent.

The authors also outline where pre-LIA ice has been exposed by melting, vs. where accumulation is still mostly occurring

In 2010, some dead moss melted out of the margin and was recovered and dated to ~ 2000 cal BP, so the authors note this patch is the smallest its been at least since then.

Also, they had a reconstruction of its 18th-19th century extent, and were able to verify it against a historical photograph, which I thought was cool.

 

 

[sokolow]

I've been waffling on the glaciation of the eastern Sierra or or Ireland for my next Pleistocene foray