Sublime

Meltwater sluiced furiously down innumerable surface and subterranean channels, creating a ghostly harmonic rumble that resonated through the body of the glacier.

The weight on 2,000-year-old ice can reach half-a-ton per square inch.

Our perspective (the entire history of human civilization) embraces only a short-lived, temporary retreat of the ice, an Interglacial. The succession of relatively long-lived Ice Ages and relatively short-lived Interglacials is now known as an Ice Epoch, and lasts for several million years.

Here’s another interesting thought. If glaciers started reforming, they have a great deal more water now to draw on—Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes, the hundreds of thousands of lakes of Canada, none of which existed to fuel the last ice sheet—so they would grow very much quicker. And if they did start to advance again, what exactly would we do? Blast

covered the land in ice, pinning reindeer on