Sue Vincent’s #writephoto prompt this week is
‘Surely not? Is that you, Gladys?’
The voice echoed down the valley, like a tsunami of gravel being tumble-dried.
‘It is, isn’t it?’
The reply, a high pitched whine, much like a chainsaw sculpting granite, bounced off the sides of the canyon. ‘Gregory? I haven’t seen you since that grind-a-thon up in Stavanger.’
Gregory’s response was thunderous, a rumble so deep it registered on the Richter scale and caused a couple of minor rock falls. ‘Those were the days, Gladys. You are looking very sparkly. How’s it going?’
The sigh, like an underground cave collapsing filled the air. ‘It’s been hard, I can’t deny it. This climate change has been murder on my crevasses. They’re as wide as a bullock’s buttocks these days.’
‘Yes. Look at my Seracs. Stumpy little things. I’ve been,’ the voice dropped twenty seven octaves and, apart from Gladys, could only be heard thirteen thousand miles away by a surprised pod of deep-diving hump-backed whales, ‘melting.’
‘Goodness, it’s happening everywhere. You had mountaineers crawling all over you, back in the day. I heard Gerald has all but disappeared.’
‘Gerald? Noooo. Surely not. His moraine was a thing of beauty.’
‘Now he’s just a couple of grubby ice piles and a giga-tonne of silt.’
‘Still you’ve made it here. That’s something, at least.’
‘It’s been a grind, I don’t mind saying. I wonder why we keep on going.’
‘Oh come on, it’s not that bad, surely.’
‘It’s not the career it once was Gerald. No one wants glaciers these days. It’s all artificial snow machines and snow globes. Once upon a time we were the landscape architects to the gods. Now we’re lucky if we see out a ski season. I’ve been receding quicker than the Donald’s hairline.’
‘You know how it will end, don’t you?’
‘We vanish?’
‘Oh worse than that. At least if we vanish we avoid being humiliated. No, Giuseppe over in the Rockies said it the other day. It we keep melting and the sea rises much more, we’ll end up as icebergs.’
‘Oh good grief, surely not.’
‘Mark my words, Gladys. If this keeps on we’ll end our days as floaters.’
Flamboyant phrasing today, Geoff
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Oooo real praise, thank you.
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🙂
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Very clever Geoff.
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Thanks Di. I think the inner life of the supersized needs more exposure…
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A terrible end for a self-respecting glacier…
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The shame. Once a puddle…
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Horrible..
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Poor nature… Feeling defunct…
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Me too….
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😊 you’ll never be defunct…
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Obsolete maybe?
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Never!
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Alas, poor Glaciers……….. Ritu said it perfectly!
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They’re very misunderstood. People think they’re slow but it’s an excess of gravitas….
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Of course it is – I don’t know why that hadn’t occurred to me before!
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LOL. Icebergs with mosquitos flying around them…
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And the poor things can’t flap them away…
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Brilliant! This is the same mournful conversation unfolding at Glacier National Park.
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It’s tragic isn’t it. Like we are losing a species of geological dinosaurs, big beasts whose imprints we will see like fossil scrapes but the creatures themselves just so much misted memories. I was up on the glacier skiing above Cervinia this year and wondering how long people might enjoy such fun.
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Perhaps by the time they all melt mud skis will have been invented. The Rangers at Glacier say they already plan to be a park that teaches what the ice behemoths once were. “There they melted,” is all the memorials pointing to bare ridges will have to read.
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sooooooo sad
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You might want to read this and see the photos of dying glaciers: http://www.mtpr.org/post/glacier-parks-shrinking-glaciers-visible-barometer-climate-change
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It’s a real challenge isn’t it?
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Oh dear. Floaters. Not a good end to days. We better do something about global warming, and fast.
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I know, a horrid way to go…
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Global warming, that’s fake news isn’t it or is that fake fact! ?
Love the idea of iceburgs being floaters💜
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it’s a tacky metaphor, isn’t it?
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That’s true but there will be nothing natural left on the planet soon, the snow and ice are disappearing even at the poles. We need to open our eyes to all these changes. It is so sad. 💜
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Yep, things change so fast…
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A sad fact of life 😱🥀
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Very well done, Geoff.
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thanks Robbie – I’m sure there are glaciers in your neck of the woods that need a good home, we should start and Open Freezer day for them
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In Africa? We have deserts not glaciers [sadly]
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Novel take, Geoff. Clever, clever! We saw a lot of glaciers in Iceland, some receding.
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Hopefully I will catch a couple when we go in October.
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