UKC

I'm an avid follower of the yearly Scottish snow patches thread on Winter Highlands, and with the coming of August things start to get interesting. I've been fascinated by glimpses of perennial snow, weather seen from a drivers seat on the A9 or up a big mountain in California. Tantalisingly there have been recent thermoluminesence findings suggesting that glaciers may have existed as recently as 400 years ago in parts of the Scotish highlands.

How much volunteer effort and hard financial resource would it take to farm a glacier back into existence, perhaps somewhere on Cairngorm where there is lots of infrastructure to help? Fencing to collect and retain wind driven snow, different fencing to stave off the hair dryer winds, moving or making snow to bulk the centre and grow the edges, late season snow making to whiten the dirtying bulk, space blankets to stave off the sun or rain. Freezing blocks of ice in the winter and transporting them to the glacier. Spraying snow with water to create wind resistant crusts.

Could sufficient work grow one to the point where the albedo and thermal mass is sufficient to carry it through all summers until flow starts? Could it ever change the local climate enough to become self sustaining? How else can it be encouraged to grow? What would it cost? What would the benefits be? Education, tourism and perhaps nature? Would you donate time or money to a glacier farming organisation? Is this the stupidest idea ever?

In reply to wintertree:

Interesting idea. One problem is that the really persistent patches are not so near the infrastructure.

In reply to wintertree:

You'd be better off farming a glacier into existence in the west, as the snow patches tend to be bigger on Ben Nevis and Aonach Beag than on Braeriach. Also the wetter, higher precipitation climate would help any glacier to grow faster than the comparatively dry eastern climate.

In reply to wintertree:

The notion that glaciers were in Scotland until 400 years ago is a well known one and backed up by historical research and lichen dating.

That said I prefer my hills without trappings of the kind you describe to enable such a 'glacier' to reform.

The idea is unlikely to work anyway. At least to the point of self sustainability as the climate 400 years ago was warming up following a period during the middle ages which I've seen referred to as a 'mini-ice age'. It was so cold in the UK there were fairs held on the Thames ice!! When the overall temperature started to rise the small glaciers in Scotland simply melted away - as they are currently doing so in other parts of the world.

In reply to wintertree:

Have a word with these chaps
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4533945.stm

In reply to Dave Perry:

I get the impression many geomorphologists view the recent work on that (Kirkbride and Everest) as an interesting oddity or an experiment in pushing the boundaries of current modelling techniques. From my reading of the paper their tone is along the lines of 'well we did the maths and it's just about possible based on our current model and at the absolute extremes of the climate of the time (with perhaps a bit of tweaking of the wind transport rates) that a tiny glacier existed in Coire an Lochan at that point'. It contains lots of assumptions and they acknowledge that.

The Beryllium 10 dating shows when the debris ridge was deposited but not how. The suggestion that it was glacially deposited is based largely on the orientation of the ridge in the corrie. Kirkbride and Everest say the 'moraine' ridge runs across the slope at an angle and from the corrie bottom it certainly looks like that. However, from the top and bottom of the ridge it appears to run straight up and down the slope and when the ridge is marked on a map it cuts the contours at 90 degrees. Rocks trundled down the slope roll parallel to the ridge rather than diverging from it as would be the case if it ran across the slope (it was a quiet day in the corrie!). The photos showing it running at an angle are an optical illusion produced by the curvature of the corrie bowl. All this is based on me spending a rainy day mooching about in the corrie with my amateur eye (well maybe semi-pro!). I'll gladly accept correction on that from anyone with a better understanding.

Here's a link to the paper for anyone who hasn't read it: http://hol.sagepub.com/content/24/2/141.full.pdf+html

In reply to wintertree:
Might be getting this completely wrong but thought summer temperatures are the important bit for marginal glaciers? So the place to start would be a mylar type shield to keep the sun off in summer (as some ski resorts in the Alps do)?

Its an interesting idea, doubt there would be enough interest/money for it in Scotland.

In reply to Brannock:


what matters is the mas ballance between winter accumulation and summer ablation (or accumulation and ablation at any time for that matter). Take the Fox and Franze ferdinand glaciers in New zealand for example. they are temperate, low elevation glaciers yet they are growing despite the warming climate due to an increase in precipitation leading to greater accumulations above the equalibrium line (ELA).

in short you can grow a glacier if the winter precipitation is high enough even if the summer temp is 30 deg

In reply to Webster:

presumably it is an attempt to shift this balance that is seen in Switzerland where some small residual glaciers get a summer overcoat of white canvas?

In reply to wintertree:

Wouldn't it be possible to just use a huge refrigeration element? I can't see why these haven't been used to counter-act global warming in other areas?

In reply to Removed Usergilesf:


A bit like the ice cube in this? youtube.com/watch?v=2taViFH_6_Y&

In reply to wintertree:

Sounds like a great plot for a disaster movie. Glacier farm on Ben Nevis sponsored by evil climate-change denier oil company. Opening scene with helicopter flying low over CMD arete and artificial glacier with happy tourists skiing in midsummer.

Meanwhile the hot female scientist main character is abseiling down a massive serac towering above Fort William taking ice density readings and becoming concerned.....

In reply to Webster:

True, but glacier county New Zealand looks to have a *lot* more precipitation even than Scotland (!) (figures from 5 mins of googling, so...).

In reply to Webster:


I'm surprised by this! When I was there, all the photographic evidence I saw (at view points and in books) showed very clearly that they had retreated MASSIVELY in the last 100 years. Is the positive mass balance you mention only a recent occurrence? Any links to support it? It would make me happy to see them, because I felt pretty depressed looking at them and how much they had changed in the last even 50 years (based on photos), with constant helicopters buzzing around showing them to tourists and adding to the problem of global warming. Very interested to hear that they're actually growing! Thanks.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

or it could be a kidnap/jeopardy movie: some dentist comes to steal it and from which he makes extra sugary endangered snow cones in a bid to not only conquer something rare but increase his income to pay for further trips(and legal costs). I am thinking Liam Neeson to get the glacier back.

In reply to wintertree:

Can we introduce Woolly Mammoths?

No self respecting newly farmed glacier should be without them.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Damn it, you've just leaked the plot of my next novel

In reply to NottsRich:

They grew heavily til around 2003 and have retreated extensively since then

In reply to Only a hill:

Don't forget the glacier bringing down the dessicated remains of an entire MRT (last seen in the final episode of Rockface). Nor Gwen Moffat's mystery of the bomber crew found to have survived a crash but not their rescue...

In reply to LakesWinter:


I thought Braeriach had the most permanent snow, the highest number of years etc..

In reply to NottsRich:

If i remember rightly (it was 2008 when i was there), they had retreated through much of the last century, but began advancing again in the last quater of the decade. maybe they have since gone in retreat again, but when i was there all the tourist information and information boards around the towns and glaciers described how they were advancing due to increased precipitation.

it is worth noting that they could both be advancing and reducing in thickness below the ELA, with an increase in the overall mass balance. you may have seen photos of them filling the valleys much more, but the snout was actually further up the valley?

In reply to wintertree:
Scotland probably hasn't had a true glacier since the loch lomond stadial about 10,000 years ago. The possibility of more recent glaciers, whilst interesting, is more of a quirk of the uncertainties and errors involved. The use of lichens ect is far from a done deal in terms of how valid they are. I also think it perhaps comes down to the definition of glacier used. Permanent snow patches probably existed for a number of decades during decade scale coolings ect. There is also the possibility of rock glaciers (now there is a real debate over the signature of rock glaciers, but I digress)

In terms of could you make a glacier grow. Yes. Glacier growth is a simple factor of inputs and outputs (melting-snowfall) if this is positive then glacier grows if not it shrinks. The biggest problem is that whilst we do have periods of cold weather I think that the rapidly changing British weather would mean that even at highest altitude snow would melt before it could accumulate enough to be compacted to form ice and thus begin to behave like a glacier. You could probably get a reasonably large snow patch to form but the energy and water involved to do so would be tremendous.

In reply to wintertree:

Oh and no one has a clue what's going on in New Zealand really.

In reply to summo:

Even in the Loch Lomond stadial braeriach had a small corrie glacier only, whereas there was a huge ice cap over Skye and the west coast. Due to wind and precip patterns, the last few snowy years have produced far larger patches on aonach beat and Ben Nevis than out east, suggesting a glacier could be farmed more rapidly out west

In reply to Webster:


I meant quarter of the century, a quarter of a decade would hardly be significant!

In reply to LakesWinter:

I was referring to the past 100 years, specifically Garbh Choire Mor. Whilst in older periods there might well have been more snow and average lower mean temps out West (west is best), I was thinking of now.

In reply to summo:

Yeah but in terms of getting the ice to a sufficient mass where it could become self sustaining and even influence the local climate then it would be quicker in the west. A load of ice in the top of observatory gully would strongly influence the micro climate there as it gets next to no sun and would possibly allow a small glacier to become self sustaining if it was helped by people to begin with

In reply to wintertree:

Read Adam Watson of Aberdeen University on the subject.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Fictional ideas - yes! But get away from the idea that oil companies deny any change. Climate realists believe what they see. Oil company people are much more thoughtful than the meeja perceives.

In reply to LakesWinter:
they are trying it for real in South America somewhere, painting the bare rocks white, where a glacier once was. No results out as yet.

Surely, the recent snow survival at braeriach would indicate that it would stand best chance of starting there, if it's almost there naturally anyway?

In reply to everyone:

Some great and knowledgeable comments in there people, thanks. I've picked up a couple of additional ideas to help from this thread - cloud seeding being one of them.

In reply to Removed Usergilesf:


They're not very useful if you look at a whole system - they move heat from one place to another, and generate additional heat in the process. So you could cool a glacier but you have to put that heat somewhere - it'll help preserve the glacier but warm up near by areas more. I believe a somewhat similar approach is used with the support legs for some oil pipelines in permafrost areas, where passive cooling is built into the legs to stop them from melting the permafrost, possibly a phase change sublimation system.

I have wondered before about building a giant tower up through the atmosphere (which would absorb most of the heat if you radiated it from the ground) and putting space facing radiators on the top. You could then generate energy from the flow of heat from the Earth to space. Funnily enough there's a Canadian firm that is getting some press over their ideas for building a 20km tall tower - http://www.cnet.com/news/an-inflatable-space-elevator-gets-a-patent/

Perhaps these space access ports should be build near glaciers. By day, giant solar panel wings on the top of the towers intercept sunlight, shading the glacier regions and generating power, and by night that power is used to transport heat from the glaciers up the tower and out in to space. Can't see any unintended consequences there...