How far can a community exist from a glacier?

milkweed said:

How far can a community exist from a glacier? The glacier in my story goes as far south as the equator where the last surviving colony, on earth, also exists.

In my story the glacier stops about five miles north of the colony and is almost a mile in height there are bogs between the colony and the glacier.

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I'm afraid I don't understand your question. As far as they want? I don't know what you're asking.

I'm guessing this is post an ice age. There's no like, the glacier is gonna get us, thing. If you want to live across the road or 100 miles away,

It has to be more than fifty miles away, or else the glacier will start stealing young woman and asking for casks of wine each weekend. And if its demands aren't met, it will make a bee-line to the city and fuck it up... in about 100 years. Shit's dangerous, ya know? People in Chile are being attacked right as we speak.

Really? It's ice.

And I have no idea what you're talking about. As long as the village ain't in the glacier's drain or on top of it, everyone is fine.

milkweed said:

Well I don't know that much about glaciers, and having done a google search for the phrase "communties near glaciers" all that pops up is Glacier National Park, and those glaciers are receeding not growing.

So what I'm wanting to know is it possible for a community to grow and thrive next to a growing glacier. I have family in Nunavut so I know it's possible to exist ""on"" ice, but they are not living in ice age conditions which I'm assuming to be different, as the climate would be in transition.

gahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....

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If there's arable land, no matter. If there's not arable land left, well, no matter. The conditions standing ON a glacier are vastly different than the conditions you'd find literally across the road from one.

Yes, the glaciers in GNP are currently receeding but the Park and many of the surrounding towns were there when they weren't. Depends on what's there.

Banff and Jasper both edge, and certainly did edge, the Columbia Icefield, afaik. As you point out, there're plenty of people living in taigas, tundras, etc., around the globe.

Your problem in what I think you're proposing would, I'd think, be more that ice covering a previously completely different climactic zone would have eliminated a lot if not most all of the native plant and animal species, leaving prospective people nothing much to eat. Like that part of Europe or Greenland or wherever in the, I want to say 1700s, when the climate changed and the people didn't want to switch to eating seafood and sort of starved. Though you seem to be proposing an even more land-locked and different climate that'd have changed.

Why not. Glaciers don't grow quickly. All you would need is a source of food.

Some glaciers extend right into rocky valleys where tourists can go check them out. They can climb around a bit too. I'm thinking of a glacier in NZ that my parents visited but I haven't.

The glacier is not a problem, and if it starts knocking on doors, people will see it coming over the course of years. It's everything else that's a problem- like food, as others mentioned.

I think the OP means how close to a glacier can a village survive and the answer to that is still the same. Depends on what natural resources are around...

By the way, any ice age that has a glacier dropping all the way down to the equator is going to affect all the climate on that world and not just locally...

thothguard51 said:

I think the OP means how close to a glacier can a village survive and the answer to that is still the same. Depends on what natural resources are around...

By the way, any ice age that has a glacier dropping all the way down to the equator is going to affect all the climate on that world and not just locally...

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Yes, I would think a totally glaciated world could still have plenty of open ocean. Villages would be on ships.

Glaciers grow because snow falls on them and adds to the ice already there. As mentioned, this is, in terms of human lifespans, a pretty slow process. In other words, no glacier will rise up and swallow a village built next to it.

More critical would be where, in relation to the glacier, the village is.

We have all seen the ice falls at the end of glaciers, with those in Alaska's Glacier Bay, near Juneau, to be some of the most well known. Big chunks of ice falling off and becoming ice bergs, etc. People would figure out really quickly not to build houses there.

But there are, and no doubt will be for as long as people think it's cool (pun definitely intended) to live near the giant rivers of ice, human habitations beside glaciers. This zone is where, in summer, some ice melts, provides source of water, and as with most boundaries between eco-zones, an abundance of life, both flora and fauna.

And if you consider the northern populations on this planet, they live on the tundra, which isn't all that different from living right on top of a glacier.

This reminds me of an old Far Side cartoon. Too cave men are standing outside their cave, looking at a glacier. One of them has his hands on his hips and says 'Hey Thag, wall of ice seem closer today?'

Can't find an image.

Snow ball earth like?

There re villages within sight of glaciers in a number of places around the world. In Greenland farmsteads are reappearing from under the glaciers that had covered the farms for several hundred yearts. In the Alps glaciers hade receded from houses farms and mines as the Earth returns to the state it was in during the Mediaval Warm Period.

If the Earth were completely claciated, then there wouldn't be any villages or houses left, because the glaciers would have scraped them away, and people would either all be dead or have left.

In prehistoric times there were two periods when nearly all of the water was locked up in ice. Those were periods when many species died off. I would suggest that you don't have the whole Earth in an Ice Age. Heeo the glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic zones and in the mountains.

King Neptune said:

In prehistoric times there were two periods when nearly all of the water was locked up in ice.

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No. The maximum glaciation in the northern hemisphere extended as far south as Iowa and Illinois, and was less extensive in the western part of North America. Much of Siberia was never glaciated. Major glaciation in Europe extended southward to the Alps. And there were four major advances and retreats of continental glaciation in the past 2 million years or so, which is an eyeblink in the overall span of Earth geologic history.

The oceans, where the vast majority of the planet's surface water exists, were still there throughout, although several hundred meters lower at surface level.

King Neptune said:

Those were periods when many species died off.

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Also no. The biggest die-off of species in recent geologic time occurred with the melting of the big continental ice sheets, and the changes in habitat that doomed many of the large animals like mammoths, short-faced bears, dire wolves, etc. That trend continues to this day, and we humans ain't helping much.

caw

milkweed said:

I don't understand your question roseangel

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Waaaaay back, more than 1 billion years ago, it seems the earth was totally ice-covered, oceans and all, for two different episodes. The situation then, however, was that there was no land-based life, and essentially no free oxygen in the atmosphere. Microbial life managed to cling on in the ice-bound oceans. It's been called the "snowball Earth" situation.

caw

blacbird said:

No. The maximum glaciation in the northern hemisphere extended as far south as Iowa and Illinois, and was less extensive in the western part of North America. Much of Siberia was never glaciated. Major glaciation in Europe extended southward to the Alps. And there were four major advances and retreats of continental glaciation in the past 2 million years or so, which is an eyeblink in the overall span of Earth geologic history.

The oceans, where the vast majority of the planet's surface water exists, were still there throughout, although several hundred meters lower at surface level.




Also no. The biggest die-off of species in recent geologic time occurred with the melting of the big continental ice sheets, and the changes in habitat that doomed many of the large animals like mammoths, short-faced bears, dire wolves, etc. That trend continues to this day, and we humans ain't helping much.

caw

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You seem not to have heard of the snowball earth periods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth

milkweed said:

I was thinking along the lines where humanity was reduced to a couple of thousand individuals, hypothesized to have lived in the equatorial zone.

Either way the glacier is in the story, it has a part in the extreme temperature and weather swings in addition to the immediate geological surroundings, dangerous ice flows, bogs, dangerous cracks in the ground, those sorts of things.

Since I have a hard science background (chemistry and applied physics) like many others I tend to get hung up on a bad science story in a book causing me to put it down and never finish the piece. That said I haven't been near a glacier since the 70's and that was in an airplane, which really doesn't count for real world experience.

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You probably should ignore the parts of the Earth that are outside the actual story. If you want glaciers, etc. then there can still be a tropicalarea, can't there? You might want to look for information about areas of Greenland where the glaciers have uncovered 800+ year old farmsto see what you might be dealing with. I was surprised that the glaciers hadn't scraped away any signs of the buildings, but it appears that some of the glaciers didn't move.

And I reallllllllllllllllly need a book on the correct use of punctuation, suggestions?

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Any good style manual will do that, unless you want something more basic, in which case a high school grammar book might work for you. You could also search for online style guides; some may have what you want.

milkweed said:

I'll look into the tropical glaciers, I do believe that there is the one in Peru or there was one there at one point that actually does sit on the equator. Good idea about Greenland, I hadn't realized that the ice had melt that far back already.

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I also think there are mountain glaciers in the Andes that may be right on the Equator.

We don't know yet what percent of Eric the Red's colony has been uncovered, but large areas are ice free for the first time in several centuries, including Eric's house and farm.

milkweed said:

Unless they are growing wheat in Greenland then not nearly enough of his colony has been uncovered, and I'm not talking the modern wheat we raise today but the ancient wheat that Eric and crew would have been raising.

I'm off to do some research, hoping I can find info from sites other than the whack a doodle sites that seem to dominate google these days.

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As I understand it, Erik's people didn't grow wheat. They grew oats, but oats haven't ripened there in the last several hundred years, but I didn't find anything just now.

Yes, it seems necessary to tailor the search terms ever more tightly.