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The most surprising glacierized country

Luckily for my country, Canada (glacierized area 201,000 km²), Antarctica (12.35 million km²) isn’t a country at all, and many people have yet to get around to thinking of Greenland (1.76 million km²) as a country. So, if you will allow me Greenland, I live in the world’s most heavily glacierized country, not excluding Russia (78,700 km²). But what about the bottom end of the list?

Mexico had 23 glaciers on three volcanoes, but the three on Popocatepetl got wiped out by an eruption a few years ago. (The secret is to stress the first e.) Venezuela is hanging on grimly but certainly unavailingly to its last five glaciers in the Sierra Nevada de Mérida. There are glaciers in all of the other Andean countries, and in Congo, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. The most poorly known of Indonesia’s glaciers, which are all in New Guinea, disappeared between 1989 and 2003. The others are likely to go soon.

Spain still has a couple of dozen glaciers in the Pyrenees. There used to be a glacieret in the Sierra Nevada, in Andalusia. It was the southernmost glacier in Europe until it disappeared in or about 1913.

Turkey has about 20 km², and Iran about 27 km², of glacier ice on scattered mountains.

Would Mongolia surprise you? Depending on which source you consult, it has between 350 and 840 km² of glaciers in the Mongol Altai and nearby ranges in western Mongolia. There is much more to Mongolia than the Gobi Desert and memories of Genghis Khan.

For a quarter of a century I puzzled over why the guidelines for the World Glacier Inventory included the two-letter country code BU for Burma. Then along came Google Earth, and I was able to zoom in on Hkakabo Razi, a 5,881 m peak near the northern tip of the country. (Sorry, I haven’t got a trick for pronouncing this one.) Sure enough, there were the glaciers. This is another demonstration of how Fritz Müller, the architect of the World Glacier Inventory, was decades ahead of his time (or at least of me). As far as I can make out, the Burmese glaciers cover 10-15 km². I even bought a digital version of a Soviet map of northernmost Burma so that I could inventory them. It is an excellent map, but maddeningly all of the contours are brown and it doesn’t show the glacier outlines.

Australia makes a good trick question for trivia contests, because of Heard Island. Heard, with 231 km² of glacier ice (in 2008; 288 km² in 1947) and the highest Australian mountain (Mawson Peak, 2745 m), is 4000 km southwest of Perth, in the vastness of the Southern Ocean. But it is a bona fide territory of Australia, cobber.

Sadly, what I used to consider the most surprising glacierized country is now off the list. Marion Island is a part of South Africa about 1800 km southeast of Port Elizabeth. The summit ice on Marion Island, covering about 1 km², was one of the world’s most elusive glaciers. The only useful description in the scientific literature was by a passing ornithologist, and the only usable map is a crude sketch by him. Like the Soviet map of Hkakabo Razi, the South Africans’ official map of their only glacier is excellent with the sole exception that it doesn’t show the glacier. It does say “Ice Plateau”, but that is it as far as glaciological content goes.

We will never know now what South Africa’s glacier used to look like. Paul Sumner and colleagues reported recently that the summit ice on Marion Island disappeared during the 1990s, leaving only remnants protected by falls of volcanic scoria.

I admit to a weakness for useless trivia. Nevertheless the search for little glaciers in improbable countries is not a complete waste of time. Of the 131,000 glaciers in the incomplete World Glacier Inventory, 97,000 are smaller than 1 km². They only account for 8% of the total inventoried area, but the true figure is probably greater. It is time-consuming to count and measure tiny glaciers, so they tend to be omitted from surveys. And that kind of percentage is not negligible if we want the best accuracy when estimating quantities such as the glacial contribution to sea-level rise.

Posted by Graham Cogley on December 21, 2009 3:00 PM | Permalink