Word: glaciered
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...less graceful moments as a seasoned runner, Erin K. Sprague ’05 stumbled up a kilometer-long glacier with a 17 percent incline. The mud-laden, rock-strewn, and icy terrain of Antarctica was most unforgiving...
From 30,000 ft. in the air, the Greenland ice cap seems impregnable, nearly 800 trillion gal. of frozen water locked safely away. But get closer and the cracks begin to emerge. Dancing by helicopter above the mouth of the Jakobshavn Glacier, near the western coast of Greenland, you can make out veins of the purest blue meltwater running between folds of ice. What you can't see is Jakobshavn's inexorable slide toward the sea at 65 ft. to 115 ft. a day--an alarming rate that has accelerated in recent years. As the glacier nears the coast...
...easy to dismiss elsewhere is undeniable on this 860,000-sq.-mi. island of fewer than 60,000 people. More and more of Greenland, whose frozen expanses are a living remnant of the last ice age, disappears each year, with as much as 150 billion metric tons of glacier vanishing annually, according to one estimate. If all the ice on Greenland were to melt tomorrow, global sea levels would rise more than 20 ft.--enough to swamp many coastal cities. Though no one thinks that will happen anytime soon, what keeps glaciologists awake at night is that thinking...
Standing on the seemingly endless ice cap, where blinding white stretches in all directions, I find it hard to imagine ever losing Greenland. But the island has surrendered an average of 150 billion tons of ice over the past four summers, melting away like the cubes of glacier--dating back to 1816--that the scientists drink in glasses of whiskey at a farewell party. As it warms, we'll probably lose more, but the hope is that through projects like NEEM, we will finally understand our climatic past before meeting our uncertain future. The scientists here think we're running...
Finally, the glacier itself: a sheer cliff of white bleeding into rock. It's moving - though we can't see it - but the melting is visible in a raging river that pours down its side, as if bleeding. The Greenlanders in our group say it melts more and more each summer and recovers less and less. Actually, the speed of the glacier toward the sea has slowed in recent years - but that's not because there's more ice. Paradoxically, because so much ice has melted away in central Greenland, there is less pressure on the coastal glaciers to move...