#laurentides

Immensité au naturel / Natural immensity par Mario Castonguay

Captée au Parc-de-la-Rivière-Doncaster, à Val-David, dans les Laurentides

Village dans les Laurentides

Did you know the “ice age” never completely finished?

By that I mean… you know the ice sheet that grinded Canada down to bedrock? The one that sat a mile high over Boston? The one that dug out the Great Lake basins? The one that pushed deep into North America, forming massive proglacial lakes and changing the courses of river systems?

That ice sheet still exists.

Sort of.

In Inuit territory, on the great island known as Qikiqtaaluk, you can lick the last, ancient icepop left from that continent-sized ice sheet that once smothered North America like a blanket.

Known as the Barnes Ice Cap, it’s the last fragment left of the mighty Laurentide Ice Sheet. And it’s melting FAST.

It will likely outlive me- but not by much. It’s like a 20,000-year-old ice cream cone, and we’ve dropped it on the hot pavement. In our rapidly warming world, it will likely be completely gone within a century or two.

Its contribution to global sea level rise won’t be particularly significant- it’s a rounding error compared to the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.

But to me, it’s like some kind of impossibly ancient alabaster tortoise;

a witness of unknown epochs of history;

critically endangered;

the last living of its kind;

doomed to perch up high on its mountain, drooling, panting, feverish, baked by the sun in a carbon blanket;

until it finally expires, leaving only bare rock and gravel for a grave:

no trace left of an ice age that covered a continent.

Found here on Facebook.