Spectacular Glacier Photos Document Earth’s Disappearing Landscape

© GeoEye/NASA, 2005 via Wired

The folks at Wired have collected thirteen pictures of various glaciers from around the globe, all shot from space and all of them amazing. The conceit of the article is that glaciers are a veritable blur of geological activity, moving, flowing, and breaking apart fast enough for us to actually observe changes. Much more exciting than mountains! Each page has specific information on the individual glaciers, and there are general insights sprinkled throughout.

File this wherever you keep the rest of the things you have to see while they still exist. Which, in the case of glaciers, won’t be for much longer:

Glaciers also provide an environmental record by trapping air bubbles in ice that reveal atmospheric conditions in the past. And because they are very sensitive to climate, growing and advancing when it’s cold and shrinking and retreating when its warm, they can be used as proxies for regional temperatures. Over geologic time, they have ebbed and flowed with natural climate cycles. Today, the world’s glaciers are in retreat, sped up by relatively rapid warming of the globe. In our own Glacier National Park in Montana, only 26 named glaciers remain out of the 150 known in 1850. They are predicted to be completely gone by 2030 if current warming continues at the same rate.

The picture we’re giving you is a 2005 shot of Bear Glacier, a gigantic chunk of ice that used to hold together this glacial lake. Three years after the picture was taken the ice melted and the lake broke through, draining out into Kenai Fjords National Park’s Resurrection Bay. All over the planet there are other lakes held in place by other melting glaciers, and not all of them will flow gently into large harbors and bays. The next few years are going to be interesting that way.

In any case, make sure you click through to Wired’s gallery. The pictures are just straightforwardly stunning.