Today we travelled through Glacier Bay. A day to enjoy some of the wonders of nature.
The park ranger on board told us that there can be mountain goats on Gloomy Knob. They usually hang out on the cliffs if there are bears around.
Luckily the zoom works on the camera, otherwise they would just be specks.
The ice was still melting and occasionally we could hear the glacier move. Well at least that is what we were told unless it was people above us moving their deck chairs.
This was John Hopkins Glacier. The dirt areas are moraines, sediment that the glacier has rubbed off the land through friction.
A size comparison with a small cruise ship, the ice is about 100 metres thick above the surface.
This is the terminal moraine of Grand Pacific Glacier. This is the material that the glacier leaves behind when it retreats, in this case through global warming. We had a talk by one of the Park Rangers on board, who explained a few things to us. Elizabeth asked a great question on what the park is doing to be sustainable, and he was able to give a really comprehensive answer.
One of the lecturers told us about this sort of terminal moraine. He gave us one really good example which was the entire Long Island, New York. The island is moraine which was left after the last glacier retreated. You can also see the difference in the water showing the limits of the rock flour, this is the sediment in the water.
We had a rather good lecture on the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon in 1898. What was really interesting was that by the time the world found about the gold strike the following year, the gold was all gone already. It took months for word to get out. Of the 100,00 miners who set out, only a fraction made it and only 12 people became rich, and only 4 actually returned home rich.
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