B is for blue. For a hundred different shades of blue, in the Bergschrunds and in the Bergs and in the boreholes, in the banding and bubbles and the boudinage, all the way to the bottom, to the base, to the bed. Basal ice, basal water, basal sliding, basal friction and the basal thermal regime. B is for bedrock.
B is for the burst of the ice-dammed lake, the breaking or the buoyancy of the barrier dam. B is for Bretz and his big, big flood. B is for Boulton and Björnsson and Budd. B is for Barclay Kamb and the Blue Glacier, and the Black Rapids and the Blackfoot and the Bering and the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island and the Cordillera Blanca in Peru. B is for Breiðamerkurjökull and the black sand beaches. B is for the long, long Baltoro and the backpacks and the blisters. B is for Bolivia, mourning its losses and waiting for the drought.
B is the balance of mass, the binge-purge oscillation, the basal shear stress equation, and the copy of Benn & Evans that will explain these things to us all.
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B is for blue. Looking up into the base of the ice from a tunnel carved by water draining from an ice-marginal lake. |
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B is for bedrock. This is Dave Sugden kindly providing scale and pointing out some features in the eroded bedrock of west Greenland. There are striations everywhere and crescentic gouges in the top left. The whole area is smoothed, streamlined, glacially scoured bedrock. |