Why do glaciers still exist today? Detailed answer

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Why do glaciers still exist today? Detailed answer

Big encyclopedia for children and adults

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Why do glaciers still exist today?

A huge mass of ice, from the formation of which the ice age began in North America, was called the "continental glacier": in the very center its thickness reached 4,5 km. It is possible that this glacier formed and melted four times during the entire ice age.

The glacier that covered other parts of the world has not melted in some places! For example, the huge island of Greenland is still covered by continental ice, except for a narrow coastal strip. In its middle part, the glacier sometimes reaches a thickness of more than three kilometers. Antarctica is also covered by a vast continental glacier up to 4 kilometers thick in some places!

So the reason why there are glaciers in some parts of the world is that they have not melted since the Ice Age. But the bulk of the glaciers that are found now, formed recently. They are mainly located in mountain valleys.

They originate in wide, gently sloping, amphitheater-like valleys. Snow falls here from the slopes as a result of landslides and avalanches. Such snow does not melt in the summer, becoming deeper every year. Gradually, pressure from above, some thawing, and repeated freezing remove air from the bottom of this snow mass, turning it into solid ice. The impact of the weight of the entire mass of ice and snow compresses the entire mass and causes it to move down the valley. Such a moving tongue of ice is a mountain glacier.

More than 1200 such glaciers are known in Europe in the Alps! They also exist in the Pyrenees, in the Carpathians, in the Caucasus, as well as in the mountains of southern Asia. There are tens of thousands of these glaciers in southern Alaska, some 50 to 100 km long!

Author: Likum A.

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

What is the pleasure center and where is it located in the body?

One of the parts of the brain is the hypothalamus, which is a part of the diencephalon and located under the visual tubercles (thalamus).

The hypothalamus, in which the centers of the autonomic nervous system are located, regulates metabolism, the activity of the cardiovascular, digestive, excretory systems and endocrine glands, the mechanisms of sleep and wakefulness, and links the nervous and endocrine systems.

In the middle of the twentieth century, another, somewhat unexpected function of the hypothalamus was discovered. It turned out that there is a special area in it, during the stimulation of which the animal experiences a feeling of great pleasure - the so-called pleasure center.

If a rat is placed in the center of pleasure with electrodes that it can close itself, the animal quickly learns to close them (to give itself pleasure) and does this at a frequency of up to 8 thousand times per hour for several hours and even days, interrupted only by eating, sexual contacts and sleep. Apparently, everything pleasant that we experience in life is pleasant insofar as it excites the pleasure center. Its direct artificial stimulation may well replace almost all life's pleasures.

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A group of Chinese scientists came up with an unusual transistor design. Thanks to their unique design, they made the world's smallest transistor with a gate length of just 0,34 nm. Further reduction of the gate length using traditional technical processes is in principle impossible, because we are talking about a gate length equal to the width of one carbon atom.

The scientists called the new transistor a vertical sidewall transistor. The idea of a vertical arrangement of the transistor channel, by the way, was also recently implemented by Samsung and IBM, which we once talked about. But the Chinese developers were able to surprise. The gate in the new transistor is a slice of one atomic layer of graphene, and its thickness, as you know, is equal to the thickness of one carbon atom, or about 0,34 nm. And the most amazing thing is that no modern lithographic scanners are needed to make a shutter of this length. All the necessary fine components are created using vacuum deposition processes.

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