An Alphabet of Glaciers - A

A, the first letter of the alphabet, is for accumulation, the first word in the story. The first word we speak. The first breath of our life.

Accumulation is snow falling in the hard silence onto the surface of an ice sheet, sea water freezing in the blue darkness to the base of a floating shelf, raindrops percolating into the summer snowpack on a mountain icefield and avalanche ice from the high peaks cascading to the glacier below.

A is also for ablation, the closing page of the book, the last line of the poem. The other end of the long slow line. Ablation is for the melting of ice, the calving of bergs into the rising sea, the sublimation of dry vapour in cold air that sucks away our life. The inevitable and unending loss. The last act. Julia Calfee's Last Songs of the Glaciers. The last moment of long ago glaciers was the moment of their final ablation.

A is for Louis Agassiz, John Andrews and Richard Alley. A is for the Athabasca and for the Aletsch. A is for the atomic lattice that holds us together and controls how we move, and for the abrasion and areal scouring which that movement allows us to accomplish. A is for Arctic and Antarctic, the Alps and the Andes. A is for ice axe and for the ancient bubbles of air that burst on your tongue as you taste the rough crystals. A is for albedo and the ash that darkens Axarjökull. A is for Alaska and Allerød. A is for the art of Albert Bierstadt and Anna McKee, for Auden's glacier in the cupboard, for the alpine cinema of Arnold Fanck... A is for all of it. The whole amazing glacier show.

   
icebergs A is for ablation and the calving of icebergs from the floating margin of the Greenland ice sheet at "point 660" near Kangerlussuaq. More on this photo here.
   
glacier A is for accumulation and the build up of snow and ice high in the Canadian Rockies at the Columbia Icefield in the catchment of the Athabasca Glacier.