glaciers

Stonehammer Geopark lies along the rugged Bay of Fundy on Canada’s southeast coast. Centered on Canada’s oldest incorporated city, Saint John, New Brunswick, it is the first North American member of the Global Geoparks Network, 77 parks established over the past decade with the assistance of UNESCO. Geoparks strive to connect people with the landscape, highlighting the intersection of society and geology.

Majestic snow-capped “fourteeners,” alpine meadows carpeted in wildflowers, pristine mountain lakes. These are the images most people associate with Colorado. One of the best places to experience this rugged wilderness is Rocky Mountain National Park in the northern part of the state.

The lower part of the Chesapeake Bay offers more than crab cakes and boating. Today, the bay is central to one of country’s largest environmental campaigns. But an excursion around the Virginian coasts provides an amazing peek into the mid-Atlantic region’s rich geological, environmental and cultural history, spanning impact events, glaciation, early colonial settlements and modern struggles with pollution and rising sea level.

Most residents of developed countries don’t think about their water running out or worry about their water leading to the death of their children. In Pakistan, those are distinct possibilities.

When an Icelandic volcano with a nearly unpronounceable name erupted after 200 years of quiet in March, it was little more than a curiosity. But when it erupted again in April — this time spewing huge clouds of ash as high as 11 kilometers into the stratosphere, quickly choking airways across Europe and costing airlines billions of dollars — it captured the world’s attention. As the ashfall decreased and airlines resumed normal routes this week, the headlines began to fade.

You never quite know when a given volcano is going to erupt — but you can bet on it. Ireland’s biggest bookmaker, Paddy Power, jetted to fame among geologists in early January, when it announced its latest novelty bet: which of a handful of famous volcanoes around the world would be the next to powerfully erupt.

Blogging on EARTH: Iceland links and Volcanoes 301

There's a lot of great info out there about the Iceland eruption's geology, if you know where to link.

When Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano began erupting March 20, few people expected it to wind up wreaking havoc on the world’s travel. Yet that’s what it has done, as the eruption has ramped up in the last few days and is now spewing steam and ash several kilometers into the air. The winds over the North Atlantic have blown the ash cloud over Northern Europe, grounding tens of thousands of flights for myriad reasons, not the least of which is that ash can clog jet engines, causing them to fail.

When deep, long-period earthquakes started shaking the area around the Katla volcano on the southern tip of Iceland in 2001, officials feared it was a sign of an imminent eruption, as such quakes can be. So they were surprised when nothing happened. A new study identifies the source of the spurious signals: collapsing glaciers around the volcano, not the volcano itself. The finding may help researchers more accurately monitor other glacier-covered volcanoes.

Going, going, gone. That’s the popular view of the fate of glaciers in the American West because of climate change. But that may not be quite true. Glaciers throughout the region are shrinking, but not at the same rates. Some are actually advancing, and others have shown relatively little retreat since the 1970s. New research shows that the retreat story is not just about temperature, but ultimately about the connections between temperature, topography, precipitation and location.

The Whillans Ice Stream — an Antarctic glacier that covers an area slightly smaller than the state of New Jersey — flows from the interior of the continent to the ocean at a rate of about one meter per day. That’s not unusual for a large glacier, but how it covers that distance is surprising. Instead of inching along at a steady pace as most glaciers do, the Whillans Ice Stream jerks forward just twice a day, each time sending out seismic waves equivalent to a major earthquake.