Stone glacier

Journal of Geoscience Education, Mar 2003 by Picard, M Dane

So, when the optic nerve

tears, in the still space of the air

all turns as white as

the snow on the Alps.

W. G. Sebald (1944-2001), "As the Snow on the Alps," in After Nature, 2002

Early in September 2001, a few days before Al-Qaeda terrorists captured four U. S. planes and in a monstrously evil attack crashed three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but were thwarted by valiant passengers in one of the planes (United Flight 93), leading to its crash in western Pennsylvania, my friend Earle McBride and I flew into Zurich and then on to Davos in eastern Switzerland for an international meeting of sedimentologists. We had finished a long hot summer of geological research and were at the beginning of the school year, Earle at the University of Texas, commencing my last semester at the University of Utah, both still lecturing in classrooms without losing our place or forgetting what came next. The long summer and my imminent retirement, which I was ambivalent about, had given me a hollow feeling, but only for a short time, I supposed. I believed that I was being careful and would come out of it. Looking ahead, I thought I remained in front of "The hollow men/ The stuffed men" of T. S. Eliot.

From Davos we took the transalpine route, the San Bernardino Pass Road, traveling through spruce, fir, Arolla pines and the ice-sculptured Alps into Italy and on south to Rapallo on the Ligurian Sea. From there we went farther south along the Tuscan coast to finish field work on honeycomb-weathering structures in sandstone that we have studied for a long time. Then we drove to San Gimignano, Modena, and across the Gotthard Pass to Andermatt, region of bears. We spent our last full day in Switzerland, the 8th of September, on the Susten Pass road and at the Stone Glacier (Steingletscher) beyond the west end of the tunnel that transects the crest of the jagged ice-carved peaks and steep-walled cirque amphitheaters of the Ftinffingerstock (Five Fingers). Like other parts of the Alps, many of the ridges and peaks appear unclimable for most field geologists, certainly for me, an unsteady climber with a cranky knee. In fact, much of Alpine mapping has been done by geologists at a distance with field glasses and on aerial photographs.

The Susten Pass road, built between 1938 and 1945, was the first great mountain road in the Confederation intended for motoring. It is a beautiful route, a wondrous road, but on the way down the pass I was on the outside, always above frightening heights. The road reaches its highest point at 7,296 ft in the 1,067 ft-long tunnel. The pass itself rises to 7,411 ft, almost 500 ft higher than Gottard Pass to the southeast, the major route for north-and south-bound traffic since Roman times. The word Susten means "public goods depot." Among great builders of the world, the Swiss belong with the very best; their tunnels, dams and roads are first-rate, and, unlike their neighbors, they finish them in reasonable time.

Around 10 percent of the earth's land surface is covered by glaciers. During the most recent full-scale glaciation, somewhere between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago, a slowly moving mantle of ice covered about 30 percent of the land. Of the remaining ice, about 85 percent lies on Antarctica and 10 percent on Greenland. Ice cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet have furnished a record of climatic changes for more than 120,000 years, through the last glacial period and into the warmer interglacial. Recent evidence from the cores indicates that temperatures changed more rapidly than glaciologists previously supposed. The entire Ice Age was a time of ups and downs to many mammals, Australopithecus, Homo rudolfensis, the Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens.

Excluding groundwater, glacial ice accounts for about 80 percent of the world's freshwater; unfortunately for the general good, 99 percent of it is held in the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets. Because of the freshwater potential, and the sensitivity of glaciers to changes in climate, the world's glaciers are being intensively studied and mapped, more so than at any other time. In the Alps, at Colle Gnifetti on Monte Rosa near the Italian-Swiss border, elevation 14,606 ft, ice cores reveal the great increase in air pollution since the Industrial Revolution. Sulfur concentrations, for example, are three times what they were a hundred years ago. The highest Alpine peaks have not remained pristine; glacial ice cores hold the dirty story of their contamination.

During the last three million years, during a succession of glacial stages, enormous ice sheets advanced and retreated across now inhabited lands of North America and Europe, as well the Andes, central Asia, New Zealand, and even over parts of Australia. Oxygen-isotope ratios of floating foraminiferans preserved in deep-sea sediments show there was expansion and contraction of glaciers throughout the Ice Age. To a large extent, Pleistocene glaciers shaped the surface of Switzerland, as elsewhere in the world. Gravel, sand, and silt of moraines still cover a large part of the country. Much of the richest farmland, though limited in area, is on glacial deposits, and meltwater in the Alps is important for irrigation. The most important gravel sources for concrete aggregate are Pleistocene out ash gravels. These high-quality gravels also are a priceless groundwater resource that is being widely misused.