398 sleeps left!!

ah yes it was 94% chance. thats even better :D im sure ill get the skiing bug. i have been around a couple of skiing shops today :lol:
and i dont want to sound thick but whats a glacier? lol

sm4sh wrote:ah yes it was 94% chance. thats even better :D im sure ill get the skiing bug. i have been around a couple of skiing shops today :lol:
and i dont want to sound thick but whats a glacier? lol

Sm4sh,
I am no sort of geographer, or geologist, but as far as I know a glacier is a large mass of ice which doesn't melt during the summer and has been around for a very long time (I should imagine since the last ice age whenever that was in the place where the glacier is).

The last ice age in Britain was about ten thousand years ago, but the ice has all melted now, although glaciers have made a major contribution to the shape and geology of Britan today (because glaciers move and gouge out valleys and carry material with them which they later drop etc. etc.).

What I noticed when I was ski-ing on the glacier at Tignes is that the ice is very hard (too hard to dig your ski edges into) and a very pretty sort of blue-green colour). Normally, ski-ing in the winter I don't think one sees the glacial ice on the piste because it's all covered in snow.

This is a photo of the glacial ice at Tignes in October. If you click on it, it should get bigger.

Ally

Oh......and here's me thinking it was a type of mint with a polar bear standing on it )

sm4sh, we need to have words my friend :) I snowboarded every calender month except June and September last year. Both could have been done but my bank manager needs 2 breaks a year! Glaciers are great places in the spring and autumn, usually the gradient is forgiving for beginners, certainly Zermatt and Saas Fee in Switzerland. The areas are not huge, but it all depends what you want. I spent a day in Zermatt in October and did 55km in about 5 hours, 90% from one lift. A glacier is basically a consolidated river of ice, it's where the temp is rarely above freezing for long periods of time so in the Alps they tend to be at altitude. The further north you travel, the lower you will find them. This is not a geography lesson however so back to the skiing. I did most of my learning on glaciers. They can be frighteningly icy, but that's not a bad thing to start on IMO, from what I read here ice is something that scares a lot of people. Ice is typically predictable and therefore consistent. Powder for example is not. Don't get me wrong a piste is the best place to learn but with some of the 365 day glaciers you will get hard piste for an hour or two a day, even in August when it is approaching 30C in the valley.

PM me if you wanna know more about skiing cheaply in reasonable conditions in the European off season, I do 50% of my riding this way.

a glacier forms when the increase in mass of a body of snow or ice exceeds the decrease due to ablation and when that mass persists for some years. It's not related to artifacts of an ice age although some will indeed be that, in fact most alpine glaciers are exactly that but it's not part of the definition. Temperatures on a glacier are little different from any surrounding terrain excepting a local cooling of air directly over the glacier. That means they'll be well above freezing most of the time and you cannot run snow cannons any more often than any terrain of similar height or aspect.

ise wrote:a glacier forms when the increase in mass of a body of snow or ice exceeds the decrease due to ablation and when that mass persists for some years. It's not related to artifacts of an ice age although some will indeed be that, in fact most alpine glaciers are exactly that but it's not part of the definition. Temperatures on a glacier are little different from any surrounding terrain excepting a local cooling of air directly over the glacier. That means they'll be well above freezing most of the time and you cannot run snow cannons any more often than any terrain of similar height or aspect.

Thanks Ise,
Well, I did say I wasn't a geographer! What's 'ablation' mean? And how old is the youngest glacier?

Ally

AllyG wrote:

ise wrote:a glacier forms when the increase in mass of a body of snow or ice exceeds the decrease due to ablation and when that mass persists for some years. It's not related to artifacts of an ice age although some will indeed be that, in fact most alpine glaciers are exactly that but it's not part of the definition. Temperatures on a glacier are little different from any surrounding terrain excepting a local cooling of air directly over the glacier. That means they'll be well above freezing most of the time and you cannot run snow cannons any more often than any terrain of similar height or aspect.

Thanks Ise,
Well, I did say I wasn't a geographer! What's 'ablation' mean? And how old is the youngest glacier?

Ally

That's an interesting question, I've never thought about it. It would be hard to answer I think, the definition is slightly vague, I said some years so that's undefined, a couple of years just wouldn't do it. I also might have mentioned that the definition would typically include some movement of the glacial mass. Likewise, some glaciers now are loosing more through ablation than accumulation, so at some point they'll cease to be glaciers. I do happen to know that the one on Mount St Helens in the US is the youngest in the US as I happened to be reading something about volcanos the other day and it was mentioned.

Ablation is easy, it's loosing stuff from the surface by evaporation or erosion, it happens to other materials but it's important in a glacier.

Thanks again Ise,
I looked up that glacier, and apparently it's only been growing since the volcano erupted in 1980, so in 2004, the date of the article, it's described as only being 'two decades' old.

But it does also go on to say that they think it's got something to do with the unusual conditions and that it has developed in a 'glacier incubator' :D

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,135148,00.html

Ally