Glaciers. Glaciers. O my God, Glaciers.
OK. Imagine hiking up a steep, rocky trail, so steep the trail is switchbacking to and fro as it writhes up the treacherous landscape, so steep that you wonder if this trail wasn't built for mountain goats 'n' snow leopards instead of mere mortal men, so steep that you look up and it looks like the trail is doing a back flip. OK. When - IF - you get to the top, imagine looking around you and realizing: THIS IS A MORRAINE. It all makes sense, it all comes together: why these weird scoured rocks? Why this abundance of serpentine everywhere? why does it looks like what you just hiked up was a long skinny pile of rocks bulldozed together by a 1,000 ft high BIG CAT?!? the answers can be attributed to one word, one global force beyond human comprehension - the overachieving construction workers of the natural world, the carving spork of the gods, the tantrum-throwing 3-year olds of geology.........G L A C I E R S (so huge a bignes!)
Phew. Just thinking about these puppies pumps me up. My colleagues Laura and Richard Candler (SNHS Curator-elect and brother of, respectfully) and Luke Padgett (Patrician Emeritus and co-Captain of the 2007 SNHS Subduction & Volcanism Reconnaisance Team: Oceania Division) shared with me the privilege of bathing in the immense glory of these bad boys under the shadow of Mt. Cook, the largest mountain in NZ and the pride of the 6-million-year-old Southern Alp Orogeny. The Tasman Glacier, pictured below, is 29km long, and the ice you see in these pictures is over 400m deep. 400m deep. 400m deeeeeeeeeep. The largest glacier remaining from the last glacier age in new zealand (ending about 18,000 years ag), this river of ice moves at a rate of 200 meters a year (!!!!!!!) and bulldozes the landscape, piling helpless rocks into kilometer-long morraines and scouring the mountain ranges, leaving miles-wide glacier valleys in its wake. It was indeed glaciers just like Ole Tasman here that carved the world-famous vistas of Fiordland (see bottom pic).
What I am trying to say is, I wouldn't want to run into a glacier in a dark alley at night. 'Nuff said.
E.M. Keen
