| Summary: | Ice Cap Shrinks, Priest Reveals: Great Taku Marvel Dying, Investigation Shows. ICE CAP SHRINKS PRIEST REVEALS Great Taku Marvel Dying, Investigation Shows JUNEAU, Alaska, Sept. 14 (AP) -- The great Taku ice cap is dying of old age. Father Bernard Hubbard, the "glacier priest" of Santa Clara, viewing the immense ice field for the first time in 10 years, found definite indications of the impending end of the ice cap, if the present rate of shrinkage continues. Returning here from an expedition into the Taku cap near the Devils paw, a high mountain on the Alaskan-Canadian boundry, the glacier priest said the cap had greatly altered its appearance since his initial journey across it a decade ago. "The ice mass is shrinking," Father Hubbard said, "as the earth still is in a recessional ice age. On the Taku ice cap, many new mountains, called Nunataks, as well as long, rocky ridges have appeared where I saw only crevassed ice 10 years ago. Breaks to Stop Soon "Nearby, the Taku glacier is over half aground and soon will cease breaking off icebergs. The lobes of Twin glacier have retreated almost a mile in 10 years and now are aground. "For several years, the Mendenhall glacier has been melting back and exposing a fossil glacier underneath the present one. "The hundreds of square miles of this ice cap and its many glacier tongues are a new layer of ice hundreds of feet thick, lying on top of a remnant of the last ice age which is a fossil body of ice entirely different in crystal form. It appears here and there as the upper layer melts."
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