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The Arctic is thawing. In summer, cruise ships sail through the once ice-clogged Northwest Passage, lakes form on top of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and polar bears swim farther and farther in search of waning ice floes. At the opposite end of the world, floating Antarctic ice shelves are shrinking. Mountain glaciers are in retreat worldwide, unleashing flash floods and avalanches. We are on thin ice—and with melting permafrost’s potential to let loose still more greenhouse gases, these changes may be just the beginning. Vanishing Ice is a powerful depiction of the dramatic transformation of the cryosphere—the world of ice and snow—and its consequences for the human world. Delving into the major components of the cryosphere, including ice sheets, valley glaciers, permafrost, and floating ice, Vivien Gornitz gives an up-to-date explanation of key current trends in the decline of ice mass. Drawing on a long-term perspective gained by examining changes in the cryosphere and corresponding variations in sea level over millions of years, she demonstrates the link between thawing ice and sea-level rise to point to the social and economic challenges on the horizon. Gornitz highlights the widespread repercussions of ice loss, which will affect countless people far removed from frozen regions, to explain why the big meltdown matters to us all. Written for all readers and students interested in the science of our changing climate, Vanishing Ice is an accessible and lucid warning of the coming thaw.
The author of "Bodies from the Ash" and "Bodies from the Bog" takes readers on a captivating and creepy journey to learn about glaciers, hulking masses of moving ice that are now offering up many secrets of the past. Full color.
In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers by Mark Carey Pdf
Climate change is producing profound changes globally. Yet we still know little about how it affects real people in real places on a daily basis because most of our knowledge comes from scientific studies that try to estimate impacts and project future climate scenarios. This book is different, illustrating in vivid detail how people in the Andes have grappled with the effects of climate change and ensuing natural disasters for more than half a century. In Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range, global climate change has generated the world's most deadly glacial lake outburst floods and glacier avalanches, killing 25,000 people since 1941. As survivors grieved, they formed community organizations to learn about precarious glacial lakes while they sent priests to the mountains, hoping that God could calm the increasingly hostile landscape. Meanwhile, Peruvian engineers working with miniscule budgets invented innovative strategies to drain dozens of the most unstable lakes that continue forming in the twenty first century. But adaptation to global climate change was never simply about engineering the Andes to eliminate environmental hazards. Local urban and rural populations, engineers, hydroelectric developers, irrigators, mountaineers, and policymakers all perceived and responded to glacier melting differently-based on their own view of an ideal Andean world. Disaster prevention projects involved debates about economic development, state authority, race relations, class divisions, cultural values, the evolution of science and technology, and shifting views of nature. Over time, the influx of new groups to manage the Andes helped transform glaciated mountains into commodities to consume. Locals lost power in the process and today comprise just one among many stakeholders in the high Andes-and perhaps the least powerful. Climate change transformed a region, triggering catastrophes while simultaneously jumpstarting modernization processes. This book's historical perspective illuminates these trends that would be ignored in any scientific projections about future climate scenarios.
A region's climate affects nearly every part of animals' and peoples' lives. Learn about how humans contribute to climate change and what you can do to help limit its effects. This title supports NGSS for Earth and Human Activity.
A never-before-seen look into the forbidding environment of glaciers, this book celebrates a realm of magnificent endangered beauty. Since 2005, renowned nature photographer James Balog has devoted himself to capturing glaciers and documenting their daily changes. These stunning images are a celebration of some of the most extraordinary natural formations on earth, as well as a dramatic and timely demonstration of the stark consequences resulting from global warming—from Alaska to Iceland to the Alps. As glaciologists for the Extreme Ice Survey, Balog and his team are conducting the most extensive glacier study ever, covering France, Switzerland, Iceland, Greenland, the United States (Alaska and Montana), Nepal, Bolivia, and Antarctica. Their high-resolution cameras capture approximately 4,000 images per year. From this collection of nearly half a million photos, Balog presents the most stunning panoramic photography of glaciers ever published.
A passionate eyewitness account of the mysteries and looming demise of glaciers—and what their fate means for our shared future The ice sheets and glaciers that cover one-tenth of Earth's land surface are in grave peril. High in the Alps, Andes, and Himalaya, once-indomitable glaciers are retreating, even dying. Meanwhile, in Antarctica, thinning glaciers may be unlocking vast quantities of methane stored for millions of years beneath the ice. In Ice Rivers, renowned glaciologist Jemma Wadham offers a searing personal account of glaciers and the rapidly unfolding crisis that they—and we—face. Taking readers on a personal journey from Europe and Asia to Antarctica and South America, Wadham introduces majestic glaciers around the globe as individuals—even friends—each with their own unique character and place in their community. She challenges their first appearance as silent, passive, and lifeless, and reveals that glaciers are, in fact, as alive as a forest or soil, teeming with microbial life and deeply connected to almost everything we know. They influence crucial systems on which people depend, from lucrative fisheries to fertile croplands, and represent some of the most sensitive and dynamic parts of our world. Their fate is inescapably entwined with our own, and unless we act to abate the greenhouse warming of our planet the potential consequences are almost unfathomable. A riveting blend of cutting-edge research and tales of encounters with polar bears and survival under the midnight sun, Ice Rivers is an unforgettable portrait of—and love letter to—our vanishing icy wildernesses.
Describes the tools that scientists use to analyze information about the Earth's climate and measure the current rate of climate change, with twenty-five projects for positive actions that can be done to protect the environment.--
In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers by Mark Carey Pdf
Climate change is producing profound changes globally. Yet we still know little about how it affects real people in real places on a daily basis because most of our knowledge comes from scientific studies that try to estimate impacts and project future climate scenarios. This book is different, illustrating in vivid detail how people in the Andes have grappled with the effects of climate change and ensuing natural disasters for more than half a century. In Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range, global climate change has generated the world's most deadly glacial lake outburst floods and glacier avalanches, killing 25,000 people since 1941. As survivors grieved, they formed community organizations to learn about precarious glacial lakes while they sent priests to the mountains, hoping that God could calm the increasingly hostile landscape. Meanwhile, Peruvian engineers working with miniscule budgets invented innovative strategies to drain dozens of the most unstable lakes that continue forming in the twenty first century. But adaptation to global climate change was never simply about engineering the Andes to eliminate environmental hazards. Local urban and rural populations, engineers, hydroelectric developers, irrigators, mountaineers, and policymakers all perceived and responded to glacier melting differently-based on their own view of an ideal Andean world. Disaster prevention projects involved debates about economic development, state authority, race relations, class divisions, cultural values, the evolution of science and technology, and shifting views of nature. Over time, the influx of new groups to manage the Andes helped transform glaciated mountains into commodities to consume. Locals lost power in the process and today comprise just one among many stakeholders in the high Andes-and perhaps the least powerful. Climate change transformed a region, triggering catastrophes while simultaneously jumpstarting modernization processes. This book's historical perspective illuminates these trends that would be ignored in any scientific projections about future climate scenarios.
Explains the physical principles underlying the behaviour of glaciers and ice sheets and concludes with a chapter on the information about past climate and atmospheric composition obtainable from ice cores. The past 40 years have seen major advances in most aspects of the subject; the book concentrates on these. It is an updated and expanded version of the second edition, and is now available in the long-awaited paperback format. Much of the book deals with developments since the second edition was published. Dr Paterson's introduction to glacier studies was with the British North Greenland Expedition in 1953-4. He emigrated to Canada in 1957 and between 1959 and 1980 studied glaciers in the Canadian Arctic and the Rocky Mountains, mainly under the auspices of the Canadian Government's Polar Continental Shelf Project. Since 1980 he has done consulting work and has also been a visiting scientist with the Geophysics Department at the University of Copenhagen (three times) and with the Australian Antarctic Division. He has also given a comprehensive lecture course at the Institute of Glaciology and Geocryology in Lanzhou, China. He is now retired (more or less) and lives in British Columbia. New paperback edition of a classic text Well-known and respected author Updated and expanded since the second edition, reflecting the advances in most aspects of the subject over the last 40 years
We hear about pieces of ice the size of continents breaking off of Antarctica, rapidly melting glaciers in the Himalayas, and ice sheets in the Arctic crumbling to the sea, but does it really matter? Will melting glaciers change our lives? Absolutely.The ice ages and the interglacial periods like we live in now are built and destroyed by glaciers. Glaciers hold three quarters of our freshwater, yet we don't have laws to protection them from climate change. Melting glaciers raise the seas, alter global ecosystems, warm our climate and bring onfloods that swamp millions of acres of land destroying coastal ecosystems and leaving hundreds of millions homeless. Healthy glaciers help keep our planet cool by reflecting solar heat away from the Earth and provide critical freshwater supply to billions that live within their meltwater runoffbasins. But melting glaciers alter ocean temperature, warm the atmosphere and cause havoc to the ocean currents and to the global jet stream, causing inclement weather, prolonged and recurrent droughts, heavy rains and intense, frequent and unpredictable storms. As glaciers melt away, their criticalenvironmental functions and services will wither. And as climate change warms their core, their weakening internal structure will cause a growing number of glacier tsunamis that can send deadly massive ice blocks, rocks, earth and billions of liters of water rushing down mountain valleys that takeout anything in their path. It has happened before in the Himalayas, in the Central Andes, in the Rockies and Western Cascades, and in the European Alps and it will happen again. As glaciers melt so do the vast swaths of permafrost environments that thrive in their surroundings, where thawingmillenary terrain rich in ice but also in methane gas captured hundreds of thousands of years ago, is now released into the atmosphere intensifying climate change even further.In his new book Meltdown, Jorge Daniel Taillant takes readers deeper into the cryosphere and connects the dots between climate change, glacier melt and the impacts that receding glacier ice brings to livability on Earth, to our environments and to our neighborhoods. He walks us through thelittle-known realm of the periglacial environment, a world where invisible subsurface rock glaciers with solid ice cores that will outlive exposed glaciers in our warming climate, but will they suffice to maintain our cryosphere and climate ecology in balance? In two closing chapters Taillant looksat actions that can help stop climate change and save glaciers and also contrasts how society, politics and our leaders have responded to address the COVID-19 pandemic and yet largely failed to address the even larger looming and escalating crisis of climate change.Meltdown is about glaciers and their unfolding demise during one of the most critical moments of our climate crisis. We may still be in time to save the cryosphere, if we can reconsider glaciers in a whole new light and understand the critical role they play in our own sustainability and if we canawaken to see how through glacier melt, geological ages are changing right before our eyes.
This book offers a comprehensive and detailed summary of our knowledge and understanding of glaciers and sets them within a global environment context. The text explains the significance both of recent advances in glaciology, and of teh many research problms that remain to be solved. The accessible style adopted in the text facilitates a clear understanding of glaciers and the role they play in global issues such as environmental change, geoorphology and hydrology. The use of complex mathematics is avoided as the reader is introduced to important concepts and techniques in modern glaciology such as deforming beds, migrating ice-divides and stable isotope analysis. This is an essential reference book for sutdents, professional geologists and researchers and would be ideal for those who want either a rapid up-date or an introduction to the subject. The books' discussion of recent discoveries and of reserch issues for the future, supported by a thorough reference list, enables readers to pursue their own areas of particular interest.
The author of Skipjack documents concerning evidence of adverse climate change in the Rocky Mountains, where climate scientist and ecologist Dan Fagre reveals how a rapid decline of alpine glaciers is threatening the mountain ecosystem.
Do Glaciers Listen? explores the conflicting depictions of glaciers to show how natural and cultural histories are objectively entangled in the Mount Saint Elias ranges. This rugged area, where Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory now meet, underwent significant geophysical change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which coincided with dramatic social upheaval resulting from European exploration and increased travel and trade among Aboriginal peoples. European visitors brought with them varying conceptions of nature as sublime, as spiritual, or as a resource for human progress. They saw glaciers as inanimate, subject to empirical investigation and measurement. Aboriginal oral histories, conversely, described glaciers as sentient, animate, and quick to respond to human behaviour. In each case, however, the experiences and ideas surrounding glaciers were incorporated into interpretations of social relations. Focusing on these contrasting views during the late stages of the Little Ice Age (1550-1900), Cruikshank demonstrates how local knowledge is produced, rather than discovered, through colonial encounters, and how it often conjoins social and biophysical processes. She then traces how the divergent views weave through contemporary debates about cultural meanings as well as current discussions about protected areas, parks, and the new World Heritage site. Readers interested in anthropology and Native and northern studies will find this a fascinating read and a rich addition to circumpolar literature.