The Secret Life of the Glacier

A glacier is not a quiet place. It lives, moves, sighs and creaks. And it remembers. A glacier forms over hundreds of years. Snow falls, layer upon layer, and the pressure from all the layers above slowly crystallises the snow into ice. Given enough time, the mass of ice begins to move under its own weight, millimetre by day, down along the mountain sides. It is slow. But it is inevitable. Along the way, the glacier scrapes rock and gravel from the bedrock beneath it. This material is what gives glacial rivers their greenish or milky blue colour. And it is the same material that, over thousands of years, has turned the valleys beneath the glaciers into the fertile, green places we see today. But the glaciers are changing. The climate is warmer, the summers longer, and the snow each winter deposits is no longer enough to replace what the ice loses. What we are on our way to see is something that will not last forever. That perhaps makes it a little more worth looking at carefully.