101s Preview — While You Were Sleeping
Glaciers have been forming over the course of hundreds of
thousands of years and are found on every continent except
Australia. These large sheets of ice have been keeping Earth a
habitable place.
As they move, glaciers wear away the terrain to carve out many
natural features such as lakes, valleys and mountains. Each of
these provide ecosystems, homes, for plants, animals and us to
survive and thrive.
During the dry season, glacial meltwater flows down to
irrigate food crops. The glaciers in the Himalayas alone — a mountain range
spanning India, China , Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bhutan and
Nepal — affect hundreds of millions of people. China and
India supply half of the world’s wheat and rice, and their
harvests rely on glaciers for water.
The vast white surfaces of the glaciers reflect the sun’s rays back
into space. This protects the land from absorbing too much heat,
and helps to cool the whole globe!
Glaciers are formed as each fresh coat of snow buries and
compresses the previous, hardening it into ice. Each layer of glacial ice
preserves a record of what Earth was like at the time — the
temperature of the air and present particles like dust, pollen and ash.
The unprecedented level of carbon dioxide in the air is
trapping record levels of heat in the atmosphere, and
irrevocably melting our ice.
Will we preserve our guardians?