Word: glaciologist
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...glacier itself would become dislodged, sending a river of ice, mud, rock and debris crashing down the mountainside and into Macugnaga situated below. Disaster was averted thanks to cooler temperatures and frantic efforts to pump water out of the lake. But for Andreas Kääb, a glaciologist at the University of Zurich, the Macugnaga incident is both a fascinating case study and an ominous sign of things to come. "Macugnaga presents most of the world's glacial hazards - ice avalanches, rockfalls, floods and a glacier advance that is very fast," he says. Scientists now believe that these hazards...
...long ago, Ohio State University glaciologist Lonnie Thompson was standing on the summit of East Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro, watching his drilling team bring up a cylindrical core of ice. With eyes honed by a quarter-century of experience, he saw immediately that the core's glassy surface was riddled with holes--not the little round holes formed by trapped air bubbles but gaping conduits that could have been excavated only by running water. It was not an encouraging sign...
...volcanic eruptions, of epochal changes in winds and rains. These memories are encrypted in dust particles, rare molecules and the properties of the ice itself. The tales they contain of thousands of years of climate changes provide intimations, and warnings, of our fate. That is why people like glaciologist Kendrick Taylor of Nevada's Desert Research Institute are drawn here. By drilling to the base of the ice sheet and extracting a 3,300-ft.-long series of ice cores, he hopes to answer new and urgent questions about the nature of global climate change...
...bird might have torn the small hole found on the back of his head, but a heavy snowfall soon covered the body, protecting it from further depredation. Soon the glacier moved in, flowing over the basin. "We know that if he had been trapped in the glacier," says glaciologist Gerhard Markl, "the body and the implements would have been ground up beyond recognition. When we recover bodies from a glacier, we often find a leg here, an arm there...
...immediate danger, explained USGS Glaciologist Larry Mayo, is that the lake, now rising about 1 ft. a day, will spill out of its southern end into the Situk River (see chart), a salmon-spawning stream that is the economic lifeblood of Yakutat. If the lake overflows, the clear Situk could become a destructive torrent of silty water about 20 times its present volume, unfit for salmon and fishermen. "In another 500 to 1,000 years," says Mayo, "Hubbard Glacier could fill Yakutat Bay, as it did in about 1130." Susie Abraham, 85, a silver-haired elder of Yakutat's native...