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| There are 5,000 square miles of glaciers in Wrangell-St. Elias Park. |
Alaska Is A Reminder That The Ice Age Is Not Yet Over
Two million years ago, all of Canada, and parts of what is now the United States was covered with icy glaciers. This was the Ice Age. Until around 20,000 years ago, a huge, uninterrupted ice sheet covered Canada, and came down along what is now the relatively balmy coast of Alaska, past Juneau, and to Seattle. Then its boundary swung to the east, sweeping over North Dakota, and headed into the upper midwest, crushing Chicago, Illinois. It also covered New York City and the entire northeast coast, including all of New England, with dense, thick, suffocatingly cold ice.In Alaska, a massive ice field also swept along the coast, covering what is now Anchorage, the Kenai Peninsula, and the area south of the Alaska Range. The Alaska Range is the big mountain range where Mount McKinley -- otherwise known as "Denali" -- is located. It's just south of Fairbanks.
But surprisingly, tens of thousands of years ago, north of the Alaska Range, in Fairbanks, there was no ice field there at all.
Around Fairbanks, it was warmer grassland. And very big mammals -- including ancestors of the modern elephant -- roamed the grass-covered land north of the big ice sheet. (We discuss these now-extinct animals elsewhere in this blog.) These "megafauna" (big animals) lived in something called the "Pleistocene" era.
Today, the glacier icefields are gone in Chicago and New York City. And so are the giant sloths, woolly mammoths, and big cave bears of Fairbanks. But, in parts of Alaska, although glaciers are still melting, glaciation is an everyday fact of life. Many Alaskans can just look out their window and see at least one glacier -- high in the surrounding peaks of various mountain chains towering near their homes.
Along the western coast of Canada, in what is now Wrangell-St. Elias Park, you can see some of Alaska's most impressive glaciers -- from the air. Glaciers in this huge national park cover about 5,000 square miles. And they're huge glaciers, even in this Alaskan world that's still surrounded by ice. One of them, the Bagley Icefield, is 6 miles wide, almost 130 miles long, and 3,000 feet thick. The Hubbard Glacier is 75 miles long and 6 miles wide, and crashes into the sea. The Nabesna Glacier is over 70 miles long. And there are many more...
Some of the park's glaciers -- like the one shown here -- look like a road, or a plowed field. Needless to say, these glaciers are blocked by dense ranges of mountains and they are almost totally inaccessible to humans, except on a flightseeing trip.