Iain Stewart & Kathy Sykes TV - David Attenborough TV - Ken Burns TV - Will’s Diary - John Muir - Mark Twain - Louis Agassiz - John Tyndall - Earth’s Greatest Spectacles TV - Tony Robinson TV -
Glaciers are shrinking worldwide. Iain Stewart & Kathy Sykes, Future Earth
The giant Baltoro Glacier in the Karakoram mountains of Pakistan. It’s the biggest mountain glacier on Earth – forty-three miles long and over three miles wide. David Attenborough, Planet Earth e2: Mountains, BBC 2006
Greenland: the fastest flowing glacier on our planet moving as much as forty metres a day. David Attenborough, Frozen Planet I, BBC 2011
To the naked eye glaciers don’t appear to move at all. David Attenborough, Frozen Planet VII: On Thin Ice
Here the glaciers marched right down to the sea ... Alaska, he wrote, is Nature’s own reservation, and every lover of wildness will rejoice with me that by kindly frost it is so well preserved. Ken Burns, The National Parks: Colter’s Hell: 1871-1890, PBS 2009
June 30: This was the most exciting day of my life! My Dad and I climbed up a glacier. A whole family of Mountain Goats came within about three feet of me! Will’s diary
Glaciers back in their white solitudes work apart from men. Exerting their tremendous energies in silence and darkness. Outspread spirit-like brooding above predestined landscapes, they work on unwearied through immeasurable ages. Until in the fullness of time the mountains and valleys are brought forth. John Muir
A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work. Mark Twain
One naturally asks, what was the use of this great engine set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth? We have our answer in the fertile soil which spreads over the temperate regions of the globe. The glacier was God’s great plough. Louis Agassiz, Geological Sketches p99, 11875
The earth was covered by a huge ice sheet which buried the Siberian mammoths, and reached just as far south as did the phenomenon of erratic boulders. This ice sheet filled all the irregularities of the surface of Europe before the uplift of the Alps, the Baltic Sea, all the lakes of Northern Germany and Switzerland. It extended beyond the shorelines of the Mediterranean and of the Atlantic Ocean, and even covered completely North America and Asiatic Russia. When the Alps were uplifted, the ice sheet was pushed upwards like the other rocks, and the debris, broken loose from all the cracks generated by the uplift, fell over its surface and, without becoming rounded (since they underwent no friction), moved down the slope of the ice sheet. Louis Agassiz, Studies on Glaciers @166
The wintry clouds drop spangles on the mountains. If the thing occurred once in a century historians would chronicle and poets would sing of the event; but Nature, prodigal of beauty, rains down her hexagonal ice-stars year by year, forming layers yards in thickness. The summer sun thaws and partially consolidates the mass. Each winter’s fall is covered by that of the ensuing one, and thus the snow layer of each year has to sustain an annually augmented weight. It is more and more compacted by the pressure, and ends by being converted into the ice of a true glacier, which stretches its frozen tongue far down beyond the limits of perpetual snow. The glaciers move, and through valleys they move like rivers. John Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps and Mountaineering in 1861
Beautiful but brutal: vast glaciers flow from lonely peaks. Earth’s Greatest Spectacles II: Svalbard, BBC 2016
Loch Ness was once filled by an enormous powerful glacier. Tony Robinson, Birth of Britain: Ice, National Geographic 2010