yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Climate 101: Glaciers | National Geographic


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

  • [Narrator] Glaciers have been shaping our world for millions of years. But as climate change warms the planet, glaciers are disappearing, not only altering the landscapes they leave behind but changing our oceans, weather, and life on earth as we know it.

A glacier is a huge mass of ice that moves slowly over land. Glaciers can be classified into two general groups: alpine glaciers and ice sheets. Alpine glaciers form on mountainsides and move downward through valleys. Sometimes, they create valleys by pushing dirt, soil, and other materials out of their way. These glaciers are found on every continent except Australia.

Ice sheets, unlike alpine glaciers, are not limited to mountainous areas. They form broad domes and spread out from their centers in all directions. As ice sheets spread, they cover everything around them with a thick blanket of ice, including valleys, plains, and even entire mountains. The largest ice sheets are called continental glaciers. They cover vast areas, including most of Antarctica and the island of Greenland.

Glaciers can form over years when more snow piles up and melts. Soon after falling, the snow begins to become denser and more tightly packed. When new snow falls and buries the previous year's snow, the bottom layer becomes even more compressed. The dense, grainy ice that has survived one year's melt cycle is called firn. When the ice grows thick enough, the firn grains fuse into a huge mass called glacial ice. The glacier may begin to move under its own weight, through a process called compression melting.

As they move, glaciers erode or wear away the land beneath and around them. When glaciers began their latest retreat less than 20,000 years ago, they left behind many landscape features, such as lakes, valleys, and mountains. Glaciers provide people with many useful resources. Glacial till provides fertile soil for growing crops. And, deposits of sand and gravel are used to make concrete and asphalt. Many rivers are fed by the melting ice of glaciers. The most important resource provided by glaciers is freshwater.

Earth's average temperature has been increasing dramatically for more than a century. Glaciers can act as indicators of global warming and climate change in several ways. Melting ice sheets contribute to rising sea levels. As ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland melt, they raise sea levels, adding fresh water to the ocean every day. The loss of glacial ice also reduces the amount of fresh water available for plants and animals on land.

Large additions of fresh water change the ocean ecosystem, as well as ocean currents. Additionally, less salt in the ocean could disturb the Gulf Stream, drastically changing the weather on land as well. Since glaciers are so sensitive to climate change, the increased speed of glacier melt is an early warning system for the rest of the planet. And if global warming goes unchecked, many, if not all, alpine glaciers could disappear completely. (soft entertaining music)

More Articles

View All
How I built a $500,000 Net Worth at 24 Years Old
So I recently learned a very valuable lesson: don’t make a claim here on YouTube unless you’re willing to back it up. I recently talked about how lessons I have learned from billionaire investor Charlie Munger helped me build a $500,000 net worth at 24 ye…
15 Power Moves to Take Control and Build an Off Grid Empire
Hey there, my friend. Let’s run away together. Let’s run away from the control of traditional financial, health care, and resource systems and take control of our own lives for a change. Now, the appeal of living off-grid has skyrocketed in the last few …
The Three Forms of Leverage
There are three broad classes of Leverage. One form of Leverage is going to be labor, which is the oldest form of Leverage—other humans working for you. That’s actually not a great one in the modern world. It used to be great in the old world, but in the …
Extraneous solutions of radical equations (example 2) | High School Math | Khan Academy
We’re asked which value for D we see D in this equation here makes x = -3 an extraneous solution for this radical equation. √(3x + 25) is equal to D + 2x, and I encourage you to pause the video and try to think about it on your own before we work through …
How to Make the Maximum Amount of Money Possible
So if you want to make the maximum amount of money possible, like, if you just, if you just want to get rich over your life, and you want to do it in a deterministic, predictable way, what you would do is you would basically stay on the bleeding edge of t…
How Damaging is Radiation?
What is radiation? Isn’t a bad type of poisoning. It’s just like a dirty word to me. It’s just something which is not good, not good for me, being a human being exposed to great amounts of it—waves of bad stuff. Yeah, I mean, it’s dangerous. We all know …