I walk past the Baruch College business school, whose sooty, sloping facade is a late-summer glacier slumping off the corner of East 24th Street and Lexington Avenue.
A portion of the glacier sheared off and an estimated 2.1 billion cubic feet of snow, trees, ice, debris, rock, mud and water continued to rumble toward the bottom of the mountain.
The horribly plausible Jan had basically trekked up to a Norwegian glacier, hacked off some ice with the permission of the Norwegian government and was now proposing to flog it to five-star hotels as the perfect accompaniment to bottles of rare single malt.
It reminded me a lot of Everest Base Camp, where Id been the previous year: stark colors, stormy lighting, ice penitentes and a sweeping glacier rolling off the sheer walls at the opposite end of the valley.
Earlier in the last century, it is believed this same glacier calved off the iceberg that ultimately sunk the Titanic.
Imagine spending a month in the same spot on top of the Greenland Ice Sheet in the hopes of seeing a glacier calve off?
The researchers were also able to show that the mass loss is largely coming not from chunks of glacier breaking off and floating into the sea, but from melting ice -- a clear sign linking the shrinking to rising air temperatures.
Being so far north, much of region - some 146,000 square km - is covered by glaciers and ice caps (a type of ice field where glaciers flow off in many directions).
In some coastal areas the tongues of ice-shelf glaciers break off to form icebergs.
The far western province of Xinjiang, home to many of the planet's highest peaks and widest ice fields, will carry out the 10-year engineering project, which aims to catch and store glacier run-off that might otherwise trickle away into the desert.
