Glacier Ice

The awesome beauty and majesty of glaciers, the world of ice which has shaped and reshaped large parts of the earth's surfaces, are presented here through more than one hundred photographs and a closely integrated, informed text. Austin Post's series of aerial photographs of glaciers along the North Pacific Coast of North America and into the interior ranges of Alaska, is supplemented with ground-based photographs taken in the course of glacier research and by additional illustrations from the Himalayas, Switzerland, Chile, and other parts of the world. The authors clearly explain the features illustrated. Their discussion of the effects of glaciers on the landscape, formation and mass balance, flow and fluctuations, moraines, ogives, and surface details is valuable for the general reader as well as the expert.

For those who have spent time walking glacial surfaces in a state of awe and wonder, this book will answer all the questions that kept arising as you moved about in that supernal world. And it will clarify in detail the terms that you have heard tossed about but which needed further definition in your mind. Like moraine, for example. Which is a deceptively simple concept, but turns out to have tremendous explanatory power when it comes to the geophysics of landscape formation. In this regard, I had once been told that Long Island was a terminal moraine. Reading Glacier Ice rendered that nugget of information viable. I now have a picture in my mind's eye of just how the one-hundred mile-long land mass came into being.

One of the most visually dramatic surface features of glaciers is the multiple median moraines that form like layer cake when several ice flow tributaries converge into an ice field of gigantic proportion. Glacier Ice includes a number of photographs of this phenomena and an explanation for its occurrence. As with other aspects of glacier morphology taken up in this monograph, after a few moments time you can begin to picture vividly the way in which the forces at work between ice and rock would produce the effect you are studying.

One thing I particularly liked about Glacier Ice is that it was written with the mountain climber in mind. Thus descriptions of various glacier features are often accompanied by comments on the type of challenge the feature in question poses to the adventurer attempting to traverse it. This brought a topic of vastness down to human dimensions and I thought it a nice touch in what is essentially a textbook about the intersection of the force of gravity as it meets up with frozen water and rock.