Glaciers are like huge rivers of ice that move very slowly due to the huge pressure caused by their humongous weight. Glaciers range in thickness from about 91 to 3,000 meters 99 to 3,280 yards for all you Americans out there. Glaciers form high in valleys between mountain or in the Polar Regions where the snow falls but never melts. In around 4.6 billion years, there have been three major periods of glaciations which were: the Varangian glaciations which happened during the Proterozoic part of the Precambrian period around 700 million years ago the next one happened in the late Paleozoic Era around 300 and the most recent period of glaciations started exactly 1.6 million years ago; and ended about 10,000 years ago.
Most of the world's glaciers are found near the North or South Pole where it is very cold, but glaciers can be found on all of the world's 7 continents like Asia, Antarctica, Oceania, Europe, South America and North America and even Africa but not in Australia but because technically Australia is in Oceania and Oceania has New Zealand which has quit a couple really cool glaciers and with a lot of good culture.
Glaciers form after heavy snow storms which forms layers and layers of snow which press on top of each other in a valley that is inside a mountain or in any other cold place and then over a couple of years the huge weight of the snow forces it to re-crystallize forming ice, now you might think that that is it but that is just the beginning of the creation it takes hundreds of years to form what we would call a glacier but even then glaciers are moving and changing all the time!
Scientists think that 10% of the land area of our Earth is covered with glaciers and around 15,000,000 square kilometers or 6,000,000 square miles (if you come from the USA) of our Earth contains Glaciers. Glaciers store about 75% of the world's freshwater (the other 25% is in lakes and rivers).It is very important for our glaciers to stay how they are and the same goes for the Poles because scientists say that by 2100 our sea will have risen 4 feet because of melting ice and global warming and although 4 feet does not sound like much it will make some islands uninhabitable and some very old tribes will die out.
This may also pose a problem for coastal sea resorts which will go out business because their resort is flooded. Glaciers can also be dangerous to people because if they are walking somewhere very cold; probably in the mountains or the poles where there are glaciers there is a small chance that they might not look where they are stepping and fall into a crack that leads down to a glacier.
They would probably not be able to get out because of the slippery ice and perish from the cold. Glaciers may be a solution to our water problems too like increasing prices to clean waste water or the pollution that the chemicals used to purify water make some scientists say but I think that maybe they will but even if they do solve the increasingly important water problems for a while there is not an infinite amount of ice and it will run out one day.
Bibliography
1. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1604 /the_importance_of_ice_glaciers_ice.html
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacier
3. http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/dsn08/pics/hanging_glacier.jpg
4. http://nsidc.org/glaciers/
5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/glaciers
6. http://jove.geol.niu.edu/faculty/fischer/429_info/429trips/NIF/Glaciers.htm
7. http://42explore.com/glaciers.htm
8. http://www.fs.fed.us/r10/tongass/forest_facts/resources/geology/icefields.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment