It’s like the treehugger equivalent to Christians seeing Jesus or the Virgin Mary in everything from concrete walls to grilled cheese sandwiches: an eerie feminine face in a melting glacier that appears to be crying a river of tears.
The image was captured on the Austfonna ice cap in Norway by marine photographer and environmental lecturer Michael Nolan while on an annual trip to observe the glacier and the wildlife that live in the area.
From The Daily Mail:
A glacier expert has confirmed the ice cap carrying an image of Mother Nature ‘crying’ has been continually shrinking by as much as 160 feet every year for several decades.
Jon Ove Hagen, a member of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) and professor in geosciences at Oslo University, Norway, has been studying the Austfonna ice-shelf since 1988.
Mr Hagen, 59, said: ‘Austfonna, at over 3,000 square miles, is by far the largest ice cap in Svalbard and one of the largest in the Arctic.
‘Retreat of glacier fronts at Austfonna over a 12-year period average a frontal retreat of about 160 feet-per-year.
‘The geometry of the ice cap is changing. The fronts are retreating, the lower parts are getting thinner, with a thinning rate of about three feet-per-year while the interior of the ice cap is thickening with about 1.6 feet-per-year.
‘The ice cap is losing about 1.6 cubic miles of ice every year.’
It’s rather eerie, no doubt about it, and it probably will end up on global warming protest posters within days. But let’s not turn this into a quasi-religious thing, eh? The general public thinks we’re quacky enough as it is.
Link [The Daily Mail]
