All 50 Uses of
glacier
in
Into Thin Air
- The magazine's intent was not that I climb the peak; the editors simply wanted me to remain in base camp and report the story from the East Glacier, at the foot of the Tibetan side of the mountain.†
Chpt 3
- In a New Zealand television interview following the expedition, Hall somberly described how he took their favorite climbing rope and lowered Ball's body into the depths of the glacier.†
Chpt 3
- Thomas F. Hornbein Everest: The West Ridge rom Lukla the way to Everest led north through the crepuscular gorge of the Dudh Kosi, an icy, boulder-choked river that churned with glacial runoff.†
Chpt 4
- On Saturday, April 6, a few hours above Pheriche, we arrived at the lower end of the Khurnbu Glacier, a twelve-mile tongue of ice that flows down from the south flank of Everest and would serve as our highway-I hoped mightily-to the summit.†
Chpt 4
- Twenty stone monuments stood in a somber row along the crest of the glacier's terminal moraine, overlookg the mist-filled valley: memorials to climbers who had died on Everest, most of them Sherpa.†
Chpt 4
- A collection of low, tumbledown buildings huddled against the elements at the edge of the Khurnbu Glacier, Lobuie was a grim place, crowded with Sherpas and climbers from a dozen different expeditions, German trekkers, herds of emaciated yaks-all bound for Everest Base Camp, still a day's travel up the valley.†
Chpt 4
- On the evening of April 7, however a breathless runner arrived in Lobuie with a disturbing message from Base Camp: Tenzing, a young Sherpa employed by Rob, had fallen 150 feet into a crevasses gaping crack in the glacier.†
Chpt 4
- Tenzing, we later learned, had been scouting the route above Camp One, climbing a relatively gentle section of the Khumbu Glacier with four other Sherpas.†
Chpt 4
- Before he even had time to yell, he dropped like a rock into the Cimmerian bowels of the glacier, At 20,500 feet, the altitude was deemed too high for safe evacuation by helicopter-the air was too insubstantial to provide much lift for a helicopter's rotors, making landing, taking off, or merely hovering unreasonably hazardous-so he would have to be carried 3,000 vertical feet to Base Camp down the Khumbu Icefall, some of the steepest, most treacherous ground on the entire mountain.†
Chpt 4
- Passing through the towering ice pinnacles of Phantom Alley we entered the rock-strewn valley floor at the bottom of a huge amphitheater … Here [the Icefall] turned sharply to flow southward as the Khumhu Glacier We set up our Base Camp at 17,800 feet on the lateral moraine that formed the outer edge of the turn.†
Chpt 4
- The route climbed up and down the unsettled rocks of the Khumbu Glacier's lateral moraine for several miles, then dropped down onto the glacier itself.†
Chpt 5
- The route climbed up and down the unsettled rocks of the Khumbu Glacier's lateral moraine for several miles, then dropped down onto the glacier itself.†
Chpt 5
- ...every now and then the trail would cross a patch of bare glacier-a translucent, frozen medium that glistened like polished onyx.
Chpt 5 *glacier = a large mass of ice that moves over land like an exceedingly slow river
- Meltwater sluiced furiously down innumerable surface and subterranean channels, creating a ghostly harmonic rumble that resonated through the body of the glacier.†
Chpt 5
- A couple of miles farther, the glacier made a sharp turn to the east, we plodded to the crest of a long slope, and spread before us was a motley city of nylon domes.†
Chpt 5
- The escarpments above camp were draped with hanging glaciers, from which calved immense ice avalanches that thundered down at 25 all hours of the day and night.†
Chpt 5
- His camp, distinguished by a huge Starbucks Coffee promotional banner suspended from a house-size block of granite, was situated just five minutes' walk down the glacier from ours.†
Chpt 5
- While working as a junior instructor on a NOLS course in the Wind River Range he plunged 70 feet, unroped, to the bottom of a crevasse on the Dinwoody Glacier.†
Chpt 5
- Our route to the summit would follow the Khumbu Glacier up the lower half of the mountain.†
Chpt 6
- As the glacier inched over humps and dips in the Cum's underlying strata, it fractured into countless vertical fissures-crevasses.†
Chpt 6
- At around 20,000 feet, where the glacier emerged from the lower end of the Cum, it pitched abruptly over a precipitous dro .†
Chpt 6
- The movement of the glacier in the Icefall has been measured at between three and four feet a day.†
Chpt 6
- A bergschrund is a deep slit that delineates a glacier's upper terminus; it forms a steep body of ice slides away from the steeper wall immediately above, leaving a gap between glacier and rock.†
Chpt 6
- A bergschrund is a deep slit that delineates a glacier's upper terminus; it forms a steep body of ice slides away from the steeper wall immediately above, leaving a gap between glacier and rock.†
Chpt 6
- Long before we'd even arrived at Base Camp, a team of Sherpas employed by Duff had blazed a zigzag path through the seracs, stringing out more than a mile of rope and installing some sixty aluminum ladders over the broken surface of the glacier.†
Chpt 6
- As I waited for Rob to lead the way, the ice underfoot emitted a series of loud cracking noises, like small trees being snapped in two, and I felt myself wince with each pop and rumble from the glacier's shifting depths.†
Chpt 6
- The glacier's continual and often violent state of flux added an element of uncertainty to every ladder crossing.†
Chpt 7
- As the glacier moved, crevasses would sometimes compress, buckling ladders like toothpicks; other times a crevasse might expand, leaving a ladder dangling in the air, only tenuously supported, with neither end mounted on solid ice.†
Chpt 7
- As dawn washed the darkness from the sky, the shattered glacier was revealed to be a three-dimensional landscape of phantasmal beauty.†
Chpt 7
- My crampons crunched reassuringly into the glacier's rind.†
Chpt 7
- Sheer rock buttresses seamed with ice pressed in from both edges of the glacier, rising like the shoulders of a malevolent god.†
Chpt 7
- I huffed toward the relative security of the serac's crest with all the haste I could muster, but Three-foot long aluminum stakes called pickets were used to anchor ropes and ladders to snow slopes; when the terrain was hard glacial ice, 'ice screws' were employed: hollow, threaded tubes about ten inches long that were twisted into the frozen glacier, since I wasn't acclimatized my fastest pace was no better than a crawl.†
Chpt 7
- I huffed toward the relative security of the serac's crest with all the haste I could muster, but Three-foot long aluminum stakes called pickets were used to anchor ropes and ladders to snow slopes; when the terrain was hard glacial ice, 'ice screws' were employed: hollow, threaded tubes about ten inches long that were twisted into the frozen glacier, since I wasn't acclimatized my fastest pace was no better than a crawl.†
Chpt 7
- Hiking up the rock-strewn ice of the East Rongbuk Glacier, he initially made fair progress, but as his ignorance of glacier travel caught up to him, he repeatedly lost his way and became frustrated and exhausted.†
Chpt 8
- Hiking up the rock-strewn ice of the East Rongbuk Glacier, he initially made fair progress, but as his ignorance of glacier travel caught up to him, he repeatedly lost his way and became frustrated and exhausted.†
Chpt 8
- By mid-May he had reached the head of the East Rongbuk Glacier at 21,000 feet, where he plundered a supply of food and equipment cached by Eric Shipton's unsuccessful 1933 expedition.†
Chpt 8
- It was apparent almost immediately that they weren't very familiar with the standard tools and techniques of glacier travel.†
Chpt 8
- As I nervously threaded my way through the frozen, groaning disorder, I noticed that my breathing wasn't quite as labored as it had been during our first trip up the glacier; already my body was starting to adapt to the altitude.†
Chpt 8
- The sun was bright when the last of my teammates pulled into Camp One, but by noon a scum of high cirrus had blown in from the south; by three o'clock dense clouds swirled above the glacier and snow pelted the tents with a furious clamor.†
Chpt 8
- It stormed through the night; in the morning when I crawled out of the shelter I shared with Doug, more than a foot of fresh snow blanketed the glacier.†
Chpt 8
- The route took us up the gently sloping floor of the Western Cum, the highest box canyon on earth, a horseshoeshaped defile gouged from the heart of the Everest massif by the Khumbu Glacier.†
Chpt 8
- The temperature had been brutally cold when we set out from Camp one, turning my hands into stiff, aching claws, but as the first of the sun's rays struck the glacier, the ice-spackled walls of the Cum collected and amplified the radiant heat like a huge solar oven.†
Chpt 8
- For the next three hours I slogged steadily up the glacier, pausing only to drink from my water bottle and replenish the snow supply in my hat as it melted into my matted hair.†
Chpt 8
- At 21,300 feet, Camp Two consisted of some 120 tents scattered across the bare rocks of the lateral moraine along the glacier's edge.†
Chpt 8
- Fifteen minutes down the glacier from our tents, their camp was clustered atop a hump of glacial debris.†
Chpt 8
- Fifteen minutes down the glacier from our tents, their camp was clustered atop a hump of glacial debris.†
Chpt 8
- Earlier in the day, Fischer was descending from Camp Two to Base Camp when he encountered one of his Sherpas, Ngawang Topche, sitting on the glacier 41 at 21,000 feet.†
Chpt 8
- A helicopter evacuation was requested for Wednesday morning, April 24, but clouds and snow squalls made a flight impossible, so Ngawang was loaded into a basket and, under Hunt's care, carried down the glacier to Pheriche on the backs of Sherpas.†
Chpt 8
- I tramped out of camp by headlamp behind Rob and Frank, wending between ice towers and piles of rock rubble to reach the main body of the glacier.†
Chpt 8
- For the next two hours we ascended an incline pitched as gently as a beginner's ski slope, eventually arriving at the bergschrund that delineated the Khumbu Glacier's upper end.†
Chpt 8
Definition:
-
(glacier) a large mass of ice that moves over land like an exceedingly slow river
The form glacial, in addition to meaning relates to a glacier, can mean:- moves very slowly (like a glacier)
- relates to a geological time period when much of the earth was covered with glaciers
- relates to ice or cold (often metaphorically) -- as in "She gave me a glacial stare."
editor's notes: Glaciers are thought of as moving very slowly and slow ones may move as little as a foot or two a year, but there are also fast-moving glaciers that can move as much as ninety feet per day.