These are some limericks I wrote while attending the 2010 Glaciology Summer School in McCarthy, Alaska. I tried to write one about each subject that was covered in lecture, although I think there are a few missing. N.B.: the tidewater-glacier-as-leveraged-bank analogy is from the actual lecture.
Ice dynamics
Though its speed is exceedingly low,
Ice is fluid, as glacier shapes show.
Non-Newtonian viscosity
Determines velocity
According to Glen’s law of flow.
Ice fabric and anisotropy
At the microscale, ice grain migrations
Derive from crystalline dislocations
Anisotropies cause
New constitutive laws
To account for in our simulations.
Subglacial hydrology
Water flows through the glacier like blood
Makes it slide over bedrock and mud
When a tunnel melts through
Or ice dam breaks in two
Out comes pouring a Biblical flood
Tidewater glaciers
When these tidewater glaciers retreat
The destruction’s both fast and complete
It advances again
On a borrowed moraine
Like a leveraged bank on Wall Street
Mass balance
Adding up rain, wind, heat, cloud and sun
To get melt isn’t very much fun
You could try degree-day
It’s an easier way
But a somewhat less accurate one
Glacial thermodynamics
Now the species of glaciers are three
Cold are fully below zero C
Temperate’s always at freezing
Polythermal’s a pleasing
Combination of types A and B
Remote sensing with ICESat
When inspecting the tracks of ICESat
Look for spots that are curiously flat
Or locations that flex
From concave to convex
It’s a subglacial lake doing that!
Gravitational remote sensing
For the weighing of glaciers, a scale
Is inevitably much too frail
But science saves face
By celestial GRACE
Which delivers the mass-balance Grail
Laser Altimetry
To determine an ice-surface height
Send out regular pulses of light
Measure time to bounce back
Then, repeating your track
Demonstrates warming glaciers’ dire plight
Inverse methods
To extrapolate former conditions
Using presently measured positions
Although methods inverse
May inspire you to curse
They’ll reveal past climatic transitions
Debris-covered glaciers
Grand white Kennicott looms above town
But its foot is all filthy and brown
If we clean off the sand
It’ll look mighty grand
Till, uncovered, it melts, and we drown.
The consequences of setting forty glaciologists loose on a small town’s alcohol supply
There’s a flow law for ice strain and shear
What we need is a flow law for beer
Given glacier grads, N,
And a drink rate X, when
Will all booze on the shelves disappear?