Glacier Photos
UW is doing some of the most progressive research on glaciers in the world. Check out and share these photos with your class to discover more about glaciers, and contact us if you want to learn more!
View of the upper South Cascade Glacier, WA in late September. Many months of hot summer days have melted through the previous winter's snowfall, revealing older ice. The glacier survives here because ice has flowed down from higher on the mountain where there is more snowfall and less summer melting. Climate change is causing snowfall to turn to rain and summers to become longer and hotter. Declining snowfall and increasing melting cause glaciers to shrink, with most Cascada glaciers expected to disappear within the next 50 to 100 years. As they do, mountain rivers will increasingly dry up in the summer
Photo Credit: Annika Horlings
Photo Credit: Annika Horlings
View of South Cascade Glacier, WA and its proglacial lake. In the past, this glacier extended all the way down the valley and the lake did not exist. During this time when it was larger, the glacier eroded a basin by grinding against the bedrock, and deposited a ridge of debris (a moraine) at the outer edge of the glacier as rock debris melted out of the ice. Once the glacier retreated, water filled the basin that had been eroded, and the moraine ridge blocked drainage. This situation is common, resulting in many beautiful proglacial lakes.
UW glaciologists roped up and making their way onto the Coleman Glacier, Mt. Baker, WA. Mt. Baker is an active volcano in the North Cascades of Washington. In between explosive eruptions every few 10,000 years, heavy winter snowfall leads to the build-up of thick glaciers, such as Coleman Glacier pictured here. Fun fact: Mt. Baker is home to the world's record for the most snowfall in one year - the Mount Baker Ski Resort reported a total of 95 feet of snowfall during the 1998-1999 winter season!
Photo credit: John Christian
Crevasses on the Coleman Glacier, Mt. Baker, WA reach an average of 30 to 45 feet deep within the ice. Crevasses offer clues to glacier dynamics and the character of the bedrock beneath the glacier. Crevasses are fractures in the glacier's surface and form inregions where the stress exceeds the strength of ice. Alpine glaciers like the Coleman Glacier flow downslope from the high-elevation accumulation zone, where perennial snowfall has built up over time to form glacier ice, to the low-elevation ablation zone, where ice is lost mainly through melting. As the ice flows over bumps in the bedrock underneath the glacier, or where the slope of the bedrock changes suddenly, the brittle glacier surface breaks to form crevasses. An analogy: when you form a pie crust and press it to the pan, the pie dough will crack if you fold it too suddenly or too much in the creases of the pan.
Photo Credit: Annika Horlings
Photo Credit: John Christian
UW researchers setting up a GPS unit on the Coleman glacier, Mt Baker, WA. GPS can take accurate measurements of the location of a point on the earth. GPS measurements, for example, can act as ground-control points for other instruments like radars (instruments which transmit and receive radio waves into the ice). Or, if repeated, they can measure surface ice speed of the glacier. To understand glacier response to changes in atmospheric forcing on a sub-annual timescale, research groups at the UW use radar to measure the speed of the glaciers on the north face of Mt. Baker during Pacific NW summers.
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Observing striated, marble bedrock at Liv Glacier, Antarctica. Striations (scratches) from when glaciers move over bedrock. While ice itself isn't hard enough to scratch rock, the ice carries pebbles and cobbles that are hard enough to scratch rock. As the ice slides over bedrock, rocks embedded in the ice carve into the bedrock, forming glacial striations. Striations are an indicator of past glaciation. When an observer sees striations on bedrock, she can infer that this bedrock used to be covered by flowing ice, and that the ice flowed in the direction of the striations. In this photograph, we can infer that Liv Glacier (the white surface in the background) was once thicker and flowed over the bedrock pictured in the foreground. Based on chemical measurements, we know that the ice lowered below this elevation around 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.
Photo Credit: Joel Gombiner
The Pirrit Hills nunataks poking through the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Nunataks, or glacial islands, are isolated mountain peaks that rise above a surface of ice. In this photograph, the foreground is part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a large, interconnected system of glaciers. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is over a mile thick in places. In this view, the ice of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet flows from the right to the left, eventually reaching the Weddell Sea, where the glacier melts and breaks up into icebergs.
Photo Credit: Joel Gombiner
A meltwater pool on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in the foreground of Mt. Erebus, Antarctica. Antarctica is so cold that many glaciers flow down to sea level and into the ocean. Ice floats in water, so glaciers flow on the top of the water when they reach the ocean. These floating "tongues" of glaciers are called ice shelves.
Photo Credit: Annika Horlings
UW glaciologist fixing an ice-penetrating radar system at Hercules Dome, Antarctica. Ice-penetrating radar works similar to x-rays of the human body - but by transmitting radio waves down into the ice. The transmitted waves travel through the ice, and they are reflected back to the surface due to changes in the density or other properties of the internal layers within the ice sheet, or at the ice-sheet/bedrock surface. How long it takes the wave to move down into the glacier, be reflected, and be measured back at the surface is recorded at the surface. By knowing the density of the snow and ice, the depth of these reflections can be calculated. Result: a picture of what the layers look like within the ice sheet. This can give researchers clues as to the character of the ice flow history, the history of snow accumulation, or whether any subglacial lakes exist underneath the glacier.