Picture of the week 43

Pictured here is the Furtwrangler Glacier which we could walk right up to and touch. The breath saving stroll from the crater rim to Crater Camp is all down hill. past the massive 40 to 50 foot walls of ice that have been standing there for thousands of years.

The Furtwrangler Glacier is shrinking from a process called sublimation. This is an evaporative event rather than the ice simply melting and running down the mountain. The other glaciers, especially the hanging glaciers, however, are susceptible to both climatic forces and experts are telling us they will all be gone by 2015.

As chance would have it, our head guide had participated the testing done by a prominent
US university about ten years ago. His team spent 22 days on the crater. I asked his opinion concerning the predictions made by the study. He turned to me and said, “The experts guessed from
Ohio”.