The Physics of Glaciers

The Physics of Glaciers in its 4th Edition, this classic text covers the physical principles underlying the behavior of glaciers – terrestrial ice bodies originating as accumulations of snow — including mountain glaciers, small ice caps, ice sheets, and shelves.  New material on climate change includes interactions between ice sheets and the ocean and atmosphere, paleoclimate reconstruction using ice cores, Quaternary climate history and the ice ages, and sea level rise. The book also explores topics of interest to geologists and geophysicists, including glacial connections to geomorphology, sedimentation, isostasy, and tectonics. -Completely updated and revised, with 30% new material including climate change-Accessible to students, and an essential guide for researchers-Authored by preeminent glaciologists.

Glacier ice covers some 10% of the Earth’s land surface at the present time, and covered about three times as much during the ice ages. Currently, all but about 1% of the ice is in areas remote from most human activities, in the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Thus it is not surprising that the comparatively small glaciers on mountain areas were the first to attract attention, in both science and literature. Mountain glaciers have long served as natural laboratories for studying glacier processes.

They are also important elements of many landscapes; they release water, scour bedrock, cool the weather in summer, and advance down valleys or retreat into high basins. Their spectacular crystalline beauty and conspicuous dynamism captivate observers. Spectacular too are the continental ice sheets, bodies of ice kilometers thick and hundreds of kilometers wide. In contrast to other topographic features of comparable size, ice sheets can change substantially over mere centuries and millennia. They command attention, in part, for their past and future influence on global climate and sea level.

They also preserve an extraordinary record of past changes in Earth’s climate and atmospheric composition. And the repeated waxing and waning of ice sheets and mountain glaciers throughout the last 2.6 Myr, the Quaternary – all testimony to the action of flowing ice.

The Physics of Glaciers goal of this book is to explain the physical principles underlying the behavior and characteristics of glaciers. Glaciers, broadly defined, refers to all ice bodies originating as accumulations of snowfall:mountain glaciers and icefields, small ice caps, continental ice sheets, and floating ice shelves. Study of glaciers is part of glaciology, the study of ice in all its forms.

Like other branches of geophysics, glaciology is an interdisciplinary subject involving physicists, geologists, atmospheric scientists, crystallographers, mathematicians, and others. Investigators trained in all these disciplines have contributed in fundamental ways to our understanding of glaciers.