"Recently I showed around a couple in their 60s who came to see the glaciers down south.
Each year, more and more of the glacier slips down to the ocean where it forms a vast sheet of shelf ice that spreads over the sea and eventually disappears.
There were no glaciers tumbling down from the mountains, no ice floes in the water.
The snow line on the southern slopes of the Karakorams lies at an elevation of 15,400 feet (4,700 metres); glaciers extend down to 9,500 feet (2,900 metres).
Gazing out across the bay, where immense glaciers licked down to the sea, and our ship lay dwarfed by the ice-clad peaks beyond, I heard a shuffle of stones behind me and soon found my feathered follower standing by my shoulder.
A 100,000-year-long cold spell triggered the growth of glaciers almost down to tropical latitudes, says Lauren Sallan, a paleobiologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
During the last major glacial event between 29,000 and 10,000 years ago, glaciers reached down to the 2600-2300 feet level, a distance of 9.3 mile from the summit.
In its lower section, a set of spectacular hanging glaciers reaches down from the snow accumulation zone at the top of the Asgaard Range.
LIKE a colossal snowplow, the last continental glacier to push down into the Poconos halted along a line near where Interstate 80 now runs, molding mountains, scattering boulders and sculpturing the spot that became Lake Harmony, Pa.
