Word: glaciers
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...tends to spread out and flow downhill because of its own weight. But this movement is balanced by the rock floor compressed under centuries of ice and snow. Some ice is lost in summer's melting and in icebergs that break off to sea. But the big glacier is refreshed with snow slowly hardening into more ice. It is this almost perfect equilibrium that Dr. Nye describes in his complicated formulas. Having written the equations, the lab-locked explorer then works backward, calculating ice depth from surface contours...
...explorer's legend cropped up again last week-the "Abominable Snowmen" of the Himalayas. Reporting on his sixth expedition to Mt. Everest, British Explorer Eric Shipton described in the London Times a hard, four-day climb to a great glacier near the high peak of Menlungtse. There, in the thin snow, he found the well-marked footprints of a strange, four-toed creature. Sen Tensing, the native guide, identified the tracks as the spoor of two "Yetis"-the same weird ogres first reported by an Everest expedition of 30 years...
Organized in 1948, by the American Geographical Society, JIRP was led by Glaciologist Maynard Malcolm Miller (now 30), who decided that the Juneau Ice Field was an ideal subject for a long-range study of glaciers. It is comparatively accessible, only twelve miles from Juneau. Out of the huge field (700 sq. mi.) flow at least eleven glaciers, ten of which are slowly receding. The eleventh, which particularly intrigued the scientists, is the great Taku glacier, which has advanced more than 3½ miles in the last 50 years...
Last summer the Jirps established their headquarters on a "nunatak," a rocky island in the Taku glacier. The scientists analyzed it for layers of summer pollen grains and proved that they could be used like the growth rings of a tree to measure the age of the ice. They explored the cold depths with drills and with shock waves from explosions. They took samples of wood from ancient trees left behind like exhumed corpses by the huge Mendenhall glacier, in the southeastern part of the field. When the ages of these trees have been measured by the carbon 14 method...
...weakness of the Columbia dates from the ice age, when a glacier blocked its deep canyon and forced it to cut a new channel. The river returned to its old bed after the glacier retreated, but the temporary channel (the Grand Coulee) is still there, a spectacular, steep-walled dry valley that leads to a cluster of level, irrigable plains...