Are Alaskas Glaciers Privileged?
A visitor arriving at the banks of the Kennicott River finds a peculiar piece of landscape immediately upstream. Jumbled piles of rocks, sand, boulders and gravel are heaped everywhere as though they had been deposited by enormous earth-moving machines. This is the terminus (lower end) of the Kennicott Glacier. The rock piles are not really rock all the way through, but rather are ice hummocks mantled by a surface layer of debris ranging in size from fine silts and sands to boulders the size of a small house. Here at the terminus, the finer materials typically lie up to about a foot thick over the ice. On some of the steep faces of the hummocks the debris may be less than an inch thick and dark ice can sometimes be discerned underneath. The debris- covered ice of the lower glacier is a treacherous surface for walking. The rocks are loose and slick ice can easily by exposed by an unwary footstep. If this is a glacier, where is the bare ice? There is plenty of it further upstream where t
