Other people talk about ice!

I’ve been trying to do more with this blog than just write text and post it—WordPress offers a wide variety of features, and blogging is at its best when it’s part of a larger ecosystem rather than just one person talking in isolation. So I’ve been adding links to the blogroll. Allow me to present a few here:

From a Glacier’s Perspective offers detailed descriptions of glacier retreat around the world, with each post focusing on a different glacier. This post describes how a glacial feature called ogives can be used to help measure glacier velocity. (Ogives are “ripples” in the glacier that form due to the influence of icefalls: the area of ice that happens to be going over the icefall during the summer melt season melts faster than the ice around it, leaving a trough that then moves down the glacier.)

The IceBridge Blog recounts news from NASA’s IceBridge Campaign. The aerial surveys of IceBridge use a variety of instruments–lasers, radar, even a gravimeter–to survey the Earth’s ice. The information gathered from IceBridge will “bridge” the gap between IceSAT-1, which stopped taking data in 2009, and IceSAT-2, which is scheduled for launch in 2016. The blog includes both pretty pictures of icy landscapes and discussions of the science behind the work, such as this post on how airborne gravimetry can tell us about the shape of the land below water and ice.

For those of you wanting to see more of Antarctica (one of my favorite continents!) there’s the “Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA)” which allows you to pan and zoom all over the continent. Anthony Powell’s photography shows the place on a slightly more intimate scale, mostly around McMurdo and including some justly famed timelapse films. Or Maria Coryell-Martin’s Expeditionary Art captures both the Antarctic and the Arctic, capturing the feel of the icy realms in a way photographs sometimes can’t.

I’ll be adding more as time goes along! In particular, I want to find some good resources on ice elsewhere in the solar system, which is a fascinating subject I haven’t even gone into yet.