Ice and Glaciers

At the end of the Iast ice age, as the Iast glacier was receding from North America, the ice melted and a giant pool of fresh water formed in North America.

And so kind of thinking about scale, my most recent obsession is actually with glaciers of course.

This is before they were separated

Here's Lonnie with a last sIiver of one of the once mighty glaciers.

This is the present day era, and that's the Iast ice age.

Drangajökull Glacier

They actually have these buses that drive up and over the lateral moraine and drop people off on the surface of the glacier.

And how do icebergs get that blue color anyways?

But anyway, off to the world of ice.

And the same glacier today.

And to the right hand side of us was this great Khumbu Glacier.

The one glacier up in Greenland that puts more ice into the global ocean than all the other glaciers in the northern hemisphere combined is the Ilulissat Glacier.

But this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it doesn't show the thickness of the ice.

They're going to get to land.

And so I actually live in Canada now, so I've been visiting one of my local glaciers.

At the other end of the planet, Antarctica the largest mass of ice on the planet.

Well, we were going into the worst part of the last ice age.

Late glacial period, I assume.

That's the period of warming between the Iast two ice ages.

This is a view of base camp.

It's the ANDRlLL project.

This is Argentina 20 years ago. Same glacier today.

This lake has been formed in the last couple of years because of the melting of the glacier.

This is an aerial picture we did this year.

Here's a mother and her two year old cub were traveling on a ship a hundred miles offshore in the middle of nowhere, and they're riding on this big piece of glacier ice, which is great for them they're safe at this point.

Icebergs are born when they calve off of glaciers or break off of ice shelves.

This is what one of our cameras saw over the course of a few months.

So, here's another time lapse shot of Columbia.

There is a custom made computer that tells the camera when to fire.

As you see, it expands to the dark blue that's the annual ice in winter, and it contracts in summer.

But, in any case, the deflation of this glacier since 1984 has been higher than the Eiffel Tower, higher than the Empire State Building.

The glacier moves but by inches.

According to scientists, in 100 years all the mountain glacier will be gone.

And here's a beautiful picture of the Andromeda Nebula, which is our closest, largest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way.

When it comes to Europe, let's set the scene a little bit.

The glaciers are actually leaving us.

Icecaps are melting, war in the Middle East,

like air is being let out of a balloon.

Unlike sea ice or pack ice, which form when the ocean freezes, glaciers are made of fresh water.

In these images we see ice from enormous glaciers, ice sheets that are hundreds of thousands of years old breaking up into chunks, and chunk by chunk by chunk, iceberg by iceberg, turning into global sea level rise.

That's outside Antarctica.

Meteorologists and environmental scientists show the growth of major hurricanes and the recession over the years of many of the world's glaciers.

It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas.

This is the largest ice shelf in the Arctic, the Ward Hunt Ice shelf.