The Glacier Toe
by Robert Bales
Title
The Glacier Toe
Artist
Robert Bales
Medium
Photograph - Photo
Description
While traveling to Hyder, Alaska a must-stop along the highway to view the beautiful Bear Glacier and this is the toe of the glacier. There are many large pull outs to stop and view the glacier.
A glacier terminus, toe, or snout, is the end of a glacier at any given point in time. Although glaciers seem motionless to the observer, in reality glaciers are in endless motion and the glacier terminus is always either advancing or retreating. The location of the terminus is often directly related to glacier mass balance, which is based on the amount of snowfall which occurs in the accumulation zone of a glacier, as compared to the amount that is melted in the ablation zone. The position of a glacier terminus is also impacted by localized or regional temperature change over time.---From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bear Glacier marks the beginning of the Kenai Fjords National Park from the East. It is the longest glacier in the park, measuring 13 miles long. We will approach it more closely but we will never come too close to it because it is not a tidewater, calving glacier. Several hundred years ago this glacier laid down a large enough terminal moraine that it cut off its own travel to the tide water's edge. Terminal moraines are built at the face of every glacier where the ice is melting. The ice has picked up lots of rock and debris as it has worked its way downhill. At the face of the glacier the glacial ice is melting and rock is being deposited into the moraine.
If a glacier stays relatively stable, advances a little in the winter and retreats the same amount in the summer, a larger than usual terminal moraine is built and this must have been what happened at Bear Glacier. So now the ice at the face of the glacier falls into a 3.5 sq mile fresh water lake. This lake is about 300 - 500 feet deep and you can make out icebergs floating in it to the right of the glacial face. Every glacier also has lateral moraines where similar melting and deposition is occurring on the sides of the glacier. Bear glacier has a third type of moraine. The stripe that runs down the center of the glacier is called a "medial moraine." When you see a medial moraine on a glacier you can tell that the glacier is made up of more than one flow of ice. On Bear glacier two flows of ice come together and where their lateral moraines meet, the large medial moraine is formed.
From Alaska.org
Uploaded
November 22nd, 2019
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