"Look at it this way"

This nice interactive infographic visualises the ice loss from Switzerland's glaciers. It is one of several from the VisQuill site , developed by Dr. Benjamin Niedermann.

There are some dramatic pictures and videos emerging from the Swiss village of Blatten , and plenty can be found online. The village had been evacuated some days ago because of fears the Birch glacier was disintegrating, one person has been reported missing, and many homes have been completely flattened. Blatten's mayor, Matthias Bellwald, said "the unimaginable has happened" but promised the village still had a future. Local authorities have requested support from the Swiss army's disaster relief unit and members of the Swiss government are on their way to the scene. The disaster that has befallen Blatten is the worst nightmare for communities across the Alps. The village's 300 inhabitants had to leave their homes on 19 May after geologists monitoring the area warned that the glacier appeared unstable. Now many of them may never be able to return. For more on this, check out David Redfern's Substack , which includes an excellent analysis of the situation. Sub...

Cross posting from the LivingGeography blog.  I spent five days of the first week of my half term in Iceland, exploring the magnificent landscapes of the country.  This introduced me to a couple of new locations which I hadn't visited before - including the car parks and tracks leading to the recent Fagradasfjall lava flows - and also reminded me of a great many that I'd been to previously before the pandemic and I enjoyed experiencing the power of Gullfoss (and the taste of the ice cream at Efstidalur). There had been some changes in tourst infrastructure in familiar locations with others being constructed e.g. a nice new toilet block at Thingvellir for visitors, and new paths etc. I will be working with Rayburn Tours  to lead future tours through 2023 and beyond. I've got a special Iceland blog which will host all the reading and planning I'm doing around these tours, which already hosts the year long 365 blog project which I completed in 2020 (when I was originally...

South Georgia at risk...  I've been following this story for the last few months. The huge iceberg called A68a which broke off the Larsen C Ice Shelf in 2017 has been drifting northwards since then.  It is now being pushed by the Antarctic circumpolar current and is on a collision course with South Georgia. This would cause environmental catastrophe for the ecosystems, including a massive penguin colony and other activities including scientific work. A68a now sliding into view on the edge of latest @CopernicusEU Sentinel-1 image (11 Dec 2020). Zoom into the detail at https://t.co/pFjLIgehvt . @BAS_News pic.twitter.com/ZDjqh8yWlb — polarview (@polarview) December 12, 2020 Full details are here in this excellent Reuters Graphic website  resource , which includes some great images naturally. Notice the inclusion of Manhattan for scale on the image above. This is not going to be pushed out of the way... If the berg lodges at the island’s flank, it could remain a fixture fo...

A couple of years ago, my book ' The Ice Man' was published, telling the story of Otzi the Ice Man, whose body was found high up in the Alps following the melting of a glacier which had covered his body for millennia. The steady melting of ice cover in many locations around the world is revealing bodies that are sadly far younger than that... The most recent discovery was reported this morning in the Telegraph , and tells the story of Jonathan Conville, who disappeared on the Matterhorn in 1979. I wonder what other discoveries remain to be made as other ice masses melt away. Finally, don't forget that Matt Podbury is developing a nice scheme based on my book.

Via Jason Sawle. Map is HERE. Hold down shift and drag out a box to zoom in...

Lessons 9 and 10  from 'Look at it this Way' focus on upland glaciated landscapes in New Zealand. This video is a 2 year timelapse from the British Geological Survey's Facebook page   of a glacier in Iceland. The latest timelapse from the BGS Iceland Glacier Observatory shows just how dynamic glaciers really are. This film takes daily noon-time images from one of our automated weather stations, between April 2011 and yesterday, May the 29th 2013. This is the ice flowing through the icefall on Falljökull, the eastern arm of the glacier. Immediately below the icefall we know the ice flows at roughly 50 meters per year, or around 15cm a day, but the icefall itself is faster flowing. We will be conducting research this September to find out just how fast…