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Receding Ice-age and the Tasman Glacier, doomed to extinction (Part 1) I went to_ New Zealand in 1965, escaping the Vietnam war 20-year-olds' birthday draft. (Somewhere in a filing cabinet I have a beige coloured _card exempting me, so in a sense the journey had been unnecessary. But there I was, and working in a New Zealand Tourist Bureau hotel, the Hermitage mount Cook, site of New Zealand's tallest and most imposing mountain, and of its longest glacier - the Tasman Glacier. That's what this post is about - the Tasman Glacier. 1966 I was an outside porter, night porter and steward, not yet 21. Night porter had some wonderful aspects after I had finished cleaning shoes placed out in the corridors. Solitude - but more later. Outside porter involved window cleaner and rubbish collector. On the day shifts I collected the bins and kitchen refuse, piled them onto a trailer and drove the Land-Rover down to the rubbish-tip at the foot of the Tasman Glacier. There amongst the rubble and moraine of the glacier, and the screeching of the seagulls daily winging across the mountains from the Tasman sea to await my deliveries, I emptied the bins. There too I learnt the challenge of backing a trailer into mud and offal and black snow. Sometimes too the cleaning the grease pits, no pleasure at all. In 2005 I returned as a tourist, to the exact same_ place. Well no, not the same_ place at all. What had been the rubbish dump was now a large lake, and the glacier previously a towering wall of ice oh perhaps 50m tall had receded some 6 or 7 kilometres up the valley. ... From the 1970s to the 1990s, small glacial lakes began to form at the terminus of the big glaciers. These lakes increase ice loss as ice at the front of the glacier calves (breaks off) into them. Many glaciers – such as the Tasman and Murchison Glaciers – are losing ice as their lakes grow. 老鬼    |
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1/31/2020 2:42 am |
Glaciers are receding all over the world...some say it is just a natural occurrance, others say it is a result of global warming. I fall into the global warming aspect...too much human activity and a couple of hundred years of humans burning crap into the atmosphere (since the dawn of the Industrial revolution), has screwed things up...what took nature millions of years we screwed up in a couple of hundred since we became modern....man will never learn as money is to be made and there are too many of us to feed...hence screw up the environment, run species of animals into extinction, make parts of our planet a no go zone due to toxicity...but someone is getting rich...we will fight world wars over resources next....
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