In an article in New Scientist for Jan 12 about frogs, it mentioned that frog ponds are often called pingo ponds, or just pingos. I turns out that they were created by glacier long ago. An interesting site about them is at http://homepage.tinet.ie/~taghmon/histsoc/vol1/13pingos/13pingos.htm

Max, wasn't Pingo Wal Footrot's niece? The Grey Ghost

Dear CK: "Pingo" was the antihelminthic Wal Footrot's niece took for her pinworms.

A bad tempered goat on the Footrot farm. Wal
originally got him to keep the grass down but he
seems to prefer Wal's fruit trees. Has a habit of
breaking loose from his chain and causing Wal a
great deal of stress.

Dear CK: I very much enjoy your childishness.

d

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.

Dear Milum: Thanks for your explanation. Hard to keep in mind that solids can flow, like salt rising slowly because lighter than surrounding solids.

thanks for the info milum - feelings of vindication on this one!!!

WWEERREE BBAACCKK stales

dunno if you're really asking CK - but it's Pongo.

homeagain stales

Hard to keep in mind that solids can flow, like salt rising slowly

I may well be wrong here, but I believe that in glaciers the motion is by extrusion -- like squeezing toothpaste from a tube.

That is: ice is somewhat plastic under pressure. A glacier's bottom ice is under tremendous pressure from the weight of the ice and snow above, and that pressure extrudes the ice outward, just as a ball of clay will spread when you press down firmly upon it.

In the current French hit movie Amelie part of the plot is based on the discovery of a WW2 aircraft that flew off course and crashed somewhere up north. Does anyone know if this Glacier Girl event is the same thing, or was it a common occurance?

By the way, if you haven't seen Amelie, I highly recommend it. It has a very intricate plot and it's funny, romantic and makes you think.

Thanks for the input Jazz, the commercials looked really interesting but these days, at twelve bucks a ticket, we try to limit our movie outings to movies we are resonably sure we will like.

__________________________________

milum, so do you know if that means the Glacial Girl would eventually have been squeezed a) flat and/or b) into the ocean.

Dear Milum: I took another look at the figures you give, and they don't seem to account for Glacier Girl being down two hundred and fifty feet in only fifty years.

Dear Keiva, belMarduk and wwh:

Keiva
Yes, your example is more palatable. The book offered this serving...think of the ice as a thick pancake batter that you are pouring on a griddle. Now drop a blueberry on top of the batter...
wwh
Yes, I thought the same thing. But the example of a six-foot annual accumulation rate given by the book was poorly stated. In other words it was indeterminable as to whether it was Glacier Girl specific. I would think that a reasonable snow accumulation in places in Greenland could easily be double that.
belMarduk
Yes bel, I wondered about that myself. Caves are voids within limestone under great pressures but not enough to make the rock plastic. I bet that if the airplane was air filled (no pun) it would have a better chance of exiting intact than it would if it was filled with ice.
Stales
Whew...stales where are you?

see it bel - it's funny, ironic, and a feast of visual style. It may strike some as slightly sacharine in its overall comic fairy-story plotting, but it is *definitely worth seeing, and particularly on the big screen in company. It is surely bound to pick up the Oscar® for Ferrin Luggage movies this year - and we ought to all support a movie that does not further cement the world hegemoney(sic) of the accent-free state

dunno if you're really asking CK - but it's Pongo.

homeagain stales

No, I wasn't really asking. As Max obviously knew!

Dear Max:Why should I trash my own thread when CK does it so thoroughly? Dog apparently had not other name. Read all about it at: http://www.oneil.com.au/footrot/ch_pongo.shtml

Hey, don't knock it, Bill. "Pingo" didn't have much mileage anyway. This way your monicker lives on at the top of Q & A for quite a lot longer, mate, and you get to whinge at me into the bargain. Fair do's, I'd say. Enjoy!The Grey Ghost

Dear Max: Far be it from me to demean Kiwi culture. Or even suggest that Footrot Fungus is epizoötic, or even merely epidemic there. However, not all AWADians are blessed with your intellectual advantages.

Didn't grow up with Footrot Flats, although I did rather with Stanley ...

Just keeping Bill's post at the top for a bit, seeing I destroyed it! Don't like having a ping ... I mean, a guilty conscience.

The Grey Ghost

I'm surprised that nobody read the link about pingos, and given me the Bronx cheer, because the pingos were formed during ice age, and not necessarily beneath glaciers.

Rotting sheep carcass Wal.........what rotting sheep carcass?

The Scarlet Manuka