Other Geological and Scientific Features
However, Griesgletscher has been rapidly retreating over the last decade - a retreat that has been monitored through extensive geological and glaciological research. The glacier, despite its size, is one of the most interesting and most widely studied in the Swiss Alps and during the last Ice Age was the source of a large tributary glacier that once fed into the main glacier that once flowed down the valley known today as Goms The glacier has a very well developed supra glacial and sub glacial drainage system, which becomes very evident during the summer months and before the recent rapid glacial retreat the glacier terminated in the man-made dam, with high ice cliffs. Surface features include glacial moraines as the glacier releases debris that has been eroded and then entrained by the glacier. The profile of the glacier is a very convex terminus, which progresses into a very gentle concave mid profile with very crevassed ice field near to the upper accumulation zone - an area which is highly dangerous and difficult to traverse.
Read more about this topic: Gries Glacier
Famous quotes containing the words geological, scientific and/or features:
“The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men’s thinkings run laterally, never vertically.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“However much we may differ in the choice of the measures which should guide the administration of the government, there can be but little doubt in the minds of those who are really friendly to the republican features of our system that one of its most important securities consists in the separation of the legislative and executive powers at the same time that each is acknowledged to be supreme, in the will of the people constitutionally expressed.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)