The Gorner Glacier

Over millions of years glaciers have shaped our planet’s mountains, carved out its valleys, deposited debris as lateral and terminal moraines, transported huge boulders from their origins, depositing them many miles away as Erratics, and provided a vital source of fresh water.

They are so slow in movement that they make a snail look turbo charged by comparison. Objects, even people, lost within their cavernous crevasses are eventually discharged at their journey’s end  –  the most extraordinary example of that being the discovery of Otzi ‘The Iceman’ who lived in 3,300BC and whose mummified remains were recovered from a glacier in the Otztal Alps in 1991.

In winter, Glaciers are pristine ribbons of white snow. In summer, the snow melts off the surface of the lower reaches of glaciers leaving a bare ice surface that is a convoluted conveyor belt for rocky debris, and cracked and fissured by crevasses – as if slashed by a knife-wielding maniac.

In summer their moods change by the hour: by night frozen and silent; but as the day progresses, riddled by burbling streams of melt water – visible on the surface and heard far below. On the Glacier du Cheilon, shortly after dawn a few years ago, I heard a series of loud ‘Booms’ emanating from deep within the glacier as we walked across it. An extraordinary sound I have never heard before or since.

And most worrying their universal retreat – witnessed with my own eyes over the past fifty years – is yet one more vital strand of evidence of global warming.

The images in this post are all of the Gorner Gletscher (Glacier) in summer as seen through a long lens from Gornergrat – 1,500ft above. From this vantage point the glacier resembles an alien landscape through which channels have been cut in a random but strangely beautiful way.

The Gorner Glacier drains part of the vast massif of Monte Rosa and Liskamm with tributary glaciers joining it as it threads its way down towards the Zermatt valley terminating in the Gorner Gorge.