Seeing the glaciers was AMAZING! Up at 1,000 feet we got an arieal view of Hubbard Glacier and Turner Glacier. Hubbard Glacier is the thing to watch around here because the glacier face (front) is pushing towards land, called Gilbert Point. If the glacier locks with the other side it will cause the Russell Fjord (lake made from melting glacier) to be blocked from draining out into the bay. If the lake can't drain, the water levels will rise drastically! In 1986 the lake levels rose 90 feet! And the fjord was blocked again in 2002. This will change the ecosystem and economy around the fjord greatly! Salmon do their runs up Sitka River and that won't happen with all the extra volume of water and all of the sediment flowing! That, in turn, changes the economy around our area too...... BIG PROBLEMS, but I have to remember that it is a natural process.... the Earth changes and does it without our permission!
USGS links:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-001-03/
http://ak.water.usgs.gov/glaciology/hubbard/index.htm
Face of the tidal glacier, Hubbard. ADVANCING! Which means it is getting larger; beat that climate change!
Where the glacier MAY hit Gilbert Point, closing of Russell Fjord from the bay.........
Huge crevasse!
Malaspina Glacier: largest glacier in North America! It took us over 30 minutes to fly over the darn thing! To get the whole thing in a photograph, you would have to be IN OUTER SPACE!!!!
That's some high quality H20. You may ask: "Why is the water that beautiful teal color?" Well because the water is so dense it is able to absorb all colors of the visible spectrum (rainbow) except blue is reflected back at us, so that is why we see the blue color.
Waterfall off a cliff from a melting glacier.
Radio point from one of our National Park towers......
The beautiful terrain!
Does the ice at the base of a large glacier also "turn" blue because of the density of it due to hundreds and thousands of years of being crushed under the weight of the ice above it?
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