Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Seracs

Should this picture be sandy brown instead of snowy white, one would be excused that he or she is on a plane flying over the ancient citadel of Aleppo instead of over the Tasman Glacier in NZ.

But these are seracs, house-size blocks of glacial ice, formed by intersecting and widening crevasses on the glacier.

Crevasses, in turn, are formed when glacial ice sheets fractured under shear stress when the glacier moves downstream. Sometimes, snow would bridge over the tops of seracs, turning them into "ice caves."

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