| Summary: | Alaska's Great Glaciers Shrink. ALASKA'S GREAT GLACIERS SHRINK. WASHINGTON, Monday, Feb. 22.—UP)—Alaska's great glaciers— huge rivers of ice — are shrinking slowly, government geologists said today, but it probably will be thousands of years before they disappear. R. H. Sergeant, head of the Alaskan Geological Survey, said that in forty years one large glacier has been reduced about 1,000 feet in thickness and has shrunk considerably in area. Others are diminishing similarly. Interest of federal geologists in the Alaskan situation was aroused by dispatches that the thundering Black Rapids Glacier is inching down the slopes of Mount Hayes. Quake May Be Cause Members of the survey who spend summers doing field work in Alaska and winters preparing their reports in Washington said the present activity may have been caused by an earthquake. S. R. Capps, who was on the opposite side of the Delta River from the Black Rapids Glacier last "It is extremely unlikely that the entire glacier has rn^de any great forward movement. Probably what happened was that a section near the terminus broke off and has upset the accumulation of ice and vegetation near it." Rapid Move Unlikely Any rapid movement of the ice river down the mountainside is unlikely, he added, because the normal speed of glaciers is about an inch a month. The fastest speed recorded is only a few feet a month. Thomas Riggs, members of the International Boundary Commission and former governor of Alaska, said one glacier which comes down to the Pacific Ocean at Glacier Bay, just north of Juneau, is receding across the Alaskan-Canadian boundary and may provide Canada with a new northern seaport.
|
|---|