Vanishing Ice Stories of New Zealand's Glaciers

About this book

This important new book describes New Zealand's glaciers, and how we have interacted with them. Glaciation has had a huge impact on the shape of the New Zealand landscape. Enormous rivers of ice once flowed out onto the Canterbury Plains, stretched beyond the current West Coast shore of Te Waipounamu/ South Island, and spread down the slopes of the volcanoes in central Te Ika-a-Maui/North Island. These glaciers of past ice-ages built plains and vast rocky moraines, sculpted fiords and valleys, and carved out deep lakes. This book tells the stories of New Zealand's glaciers through the lens of human interaction, with chapters moving through time from first Maori discoverers to colonial explorers, mountaineers and modern glaciologists. In the process, the book investigates the way nature, science and culture interact and sometimes collide, while providing a fascinating insight into the way New Zealand's glaciers work. As the world warms, our glaciers are disappearing at an unprecedented rate, which gives Vanishing Ice an important, if not poignant, place in the books about Aotearoa's natural world.

Contents

Introduction

PART 1: ICE ADVANCED
1 Glaciers of old
2 The Little Ice Age
3 The ice age
4 Alone in the Antipodes
5 Glaciers and gold
6 A glacier war won
7 The ice plough
8 Measurements and mountaineers

PART 2: IN RETREAT
9 An excuse for exploration
10 Guiding the glaciers
11 Advancing - or not?
12 Ice flows
13 Melting point
14 Which weather?
15 Catastrophism makes a comeback
16 Into the Anthropocene

Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Lynley Hargreaves is a science writer who lives on the Te Tai Poutini West Coast of the South Island, with her glaciologist partner and two children. After gaining a mathematical physics degree, Lynley spent a year working for a United States physics magazine and then completed a journalism diploma. She was employed by the Royal Society Te Aparangi for many years and now works in communications at Forest & Bird. She has spent much of her life exploring New Zealand's mountains and continues to try to protect our mountain environments from climate change. This is her first book.