Amazing - and disturbing...
Icecap photo shows 'mother nature in tears'
A photograph of a shrinking icecap that looks like 'mother nature in tears' is set to become a stark image of the dangers of global warming.
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
Published: 6:10PM BST 02 Sep 2009
Marine photographer and environmental lecturer Michael Nolan captured the pictures while on an annual voyage to observe the largest icecap in Norway Austfonna on July 16.
He said the image looked just like mother nature in tears, "as if she was crying about our inability to reduce global warming".
'Tears' in the natural sculpture were created by a waterfall of glacial water falling from one of the face's 'eyes'.
Mr Nolan has visited Norway's largest the icecap on the island of Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago for several years.
"The icescape changes every year I visit. Every summer the route has less ice as the polar cap retreats," he said.
"On this trip I was struck myself by the amazing image of a woman's face, a motherly face, crying. Totally natural but very animated because of the amount of melt water running off.
"This is how one would imagine mother nature would express her sentiments about our inability to reduce global warming. It seemed an obvious place for her to appear, on the front of a retreating ice shelf, crying.
"It exactly fits with my image of mother nature, wise to the way of the world, and saddened by it."
Jon Ove Hagen, a member of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) and professor in geosciences at Oslo University, Norway, has been studying the Austfonna ice-shelf since 1988.
He said the Austfonna icecap has been shrinking by as much as 160 feet every year for several decades.
"The geometry of the ice cap is changing. The fronts are retreating, the lower parts are getting thinner, with a thinning rate of about three feet-per-year while the interior of the ice cap is thickening with about 1.6 feet-per-year," he said.
"The ice cap is losing about 1.6 cubic miles of ice every year."
" It is of course a concern, but not more than in other parts of the world were we see even more rapid changes than here."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthn ... tears.html
