The Columbian Glaciers

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Ten percent of land area on Earth is covered with glacial ice, this covers over five point eight million square miles. Making up seventy-five percent of the world’s freshwater. In the ice bound regions of the earth, something unprecedented is happening. Everywhere glaciers and ice sheets have been broken apart, accelerating towards the oceans, faster than ever imagined possible. Moving glaciers are one the Earth’s most powerful sources of force. Glaciers on this planet have always been forming and melting, but nothing of this magnitude. Ultimately, having the very real potential to change the history of the planet.
There are places on Earth that are so cold that water is frozen solid, these places are referred to as the Cryosphere. Here is …show more content…
What they found is that water is the biggest contributing factor to the receding of glaciers. Water is prying the ice apart. Calving is due to water cracking the ice. As rising temperatures because more of a factor, surface melt water pours into the cracks in the glacier, wedging it apart. This results in quicker calving of the glacier. Scientists have tracked the glacier, overtime discovering that it moves around fifty feet per day, eight times faster than it was moving compared to thirty years ago. Researchers believe that the Columbian glaciers in Alaska are at the point of no returns and is only a matter of time before it is completely melted …show more content…
The two go hand in hand and are reflective of each other. The only explanation after all the evidence scientists have collected over the years and taken into account leads them to believe that the burning of fossil fuels is to blame for the dramatic increase in temperature. Scientists believe humans have been driving these changes. For scientists, the overall hardest thing for them would be the level of unpredictability that surrounds the topic of climate change having to do with glaciers. It is even difficult to understand what ice is solid and what ice is safe to study from along with what areas of glaciers are dangerous and extremely unsafe to study from. Entire landscapes balance between solid and liquid states. Monumental changes are happening and at rates faster than mankind could ever imagine. This begs the question, how fast will the world’s glaciers and ice sheets melt, and what will all that melting means for us? It is a massive question to be discovered on some of the most hostile environments on earth. Shifts in earth’s orbit around the sun have caused ice ages and periods of warming. Since the industrial revolution, the steady increase in greenhouse gases has trapped heat in the atmosphere. Temperatures are rising and the ice is receding faster than ever. It is the speed of the melt that is most astonishing to
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