Wikibooks: Planet Earth/5i. Earth’s Ice: Glaciers, Ice Sheets, and Sea Ice.

• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Subjects: Jagged; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Planet_Earth/5i._Earth%E2%80%99s_Ice:_Glaciers,_Ice_Sheets,_and_Sea_Ice.

=Glaciers= In late summer there is a valley high in the that is filled with the cracked and tumbled rocks that appear to have been pushed and bashed down the valley floor by giants. Large boulders jagged and angular point upward to the surrounding steep mountain sides. These are the German for Aare Glaciers a system of two major glaciers that are the source for the in Western Switzerland. The glaciers today have retreated up the valley a relic of their former glory with the northern glacier Lauleraar and southern glacier Finsteraar retreating into their respective separate valleys but two hundred years ago these great glaciers extended down the valley meeting for a combined glacier (called the Unteraar glacier) that extended for 3 kilometers burying these rocks in thick sheets of frozen ice. The Swiss painter Caspar Wolf captured these glaciers in beautiful and dramatic paintings of large boulders tossed by giants and massive ice sheets tumbling down the valleys of mountains piles of ice and snow. Of blue green ice that jaggedly pointed skyward from a landscape that bears little resemblance to the warmer Earth today. Near where the two glaciers meet was constructed a small shelter of rocks named ironically the Hôtel des Neuchátelois. It was here in this shelter surrounded by ice and snow that one of the important geological studies was carried out by a Swiss scientist named Louis Agassiz a scientist who would have a major influence on how we see the world today. In 1832 was hired by the in Switzerland to teach natural history. He was at the time engrossed in studying tropical fish brought back from early expeditions from the Amazon Basin of Brazil. The mountainous cold landscape of the Swiss Alps unfortunately was not the most ideal place to study tropical fish but Agassiz discovered that by hiking around the mountainous region he could find the petrified remains of fish that lived along ago buried in the rock layers. Embarking on a study of these fossil fish Agassiz would spend most days in the mountains ...