Thanks wwh, for resurrecting the subject of glaciers. These comments were to be posted on Wordwind's Glacial Thread, but she stopped posting and the thread went away.
One item of discussion was... How did the airplane Glacial Girl and other Word War Two aircraft become buried beneath Two hundred feet of ice in only sixty years?
Last summer I read a well written book entitled The Two Mile Time Machine. Here is what they said about the burial of the Glacial Girl...
The Glacial Girl and her sister ships just happened to go down in the place in Greenland where snow falls most. There, snow accumulates in the winter with only a slight runoff in the summer. An annual transformation of six feet of snow into about two feet of firn (rounded, compacted snow) is a good measure. In about a hundred years at about two hundred feet in depth, the ice undergoes a final recrystalisation. The ice has now been transformed into about one foot of true glacial ice. With increasing pressure and at greater depths, this one foot of ice will be squeezed into a thickness of only six inches, this necessitates the the lateral flow of the highly compressed ice and so the ice field grows laterally and discharges ice as melt or icebergs at its perimeters.
So input equals output, therefore the ice pack doesn't grow in elevation, and any airplane resting on the ice can expect, through time, to enjoy a ride down through the ice and one day, a horizontal trip to the sea.
