Consider the Glacier
By Nestor Walters
Maine’s virtual Ice Age tour begins on a well-known coast-side mountain peak marked by smoothed boulders and rivulet-like ridges [1]. The landscape was formed, according to our guide, the late Dr. Harold W. Borns of the University of Maine, by an ice sheet that, twenty-five thousand years ago, was two miles thick over this particular mountain. “Under my feet,” Dr. Borns tells us, “was the first piece of Maine to see the light of day after the Laurentide ice sheet retreated.”
Glaciers form as snow packs thicker and thicker onto itself until it presses into ice and gathers enough mass and pressure to begin flowing [2]. Glaciers can also accumulate mass from wind-carried drift, ice avalanches, and water frozen directly to the glacier, and they can lose ice directly to sunlight-induced vaporization, to wind scour, to melt, and to calving at the margins. Debris can increase melting by reducing the ice’s ability to reflect sunlight, or decrease melting by insulating from the sun. The imaginary line between where a glacier gains and loses ice is called its equilibrium line.
The second video of the virtual tour is at the edge of a pond where Dr. Borns stands with two bubble-shaped hills in the background [1]. The hills are smooth on one side and jagged on the other because the ice once flowed over them from one direction and plucked and carried away their material toward the other. On one hill, Dr. Borns tells us, a block of pink granite “the size of a garage” sits on a bed of white granite. The closest source of pink granite is over thirty miles away, and this is indicative of glacial flow capabilities.
Tectonic plates affect glaciation by thrusting up new mountains whose weathering by carbonic acid rain trickles into groundwater, streams, rivers, and the ocean and is then pocketed by tiny shell creatures as carbonate [2]. This removes carbon from the atmosphere and cools the planet. The shapes and locations of continents, molded by slow magmatic churning, also influence glaciers. They route ocean and atmospheric currents, expose more or less land to higher or lower latitudes, and drive higher or lower elevations to receive more or less rain. Higher elevations themselves, with lower temperatures, encourage snow to pack into ice and trickle down as a glacier.
In the third video, on a coast of rippling water with a rolling green hill behind it and an open blue sky above, we are told that the Sound that Dr. Borns stands beside is the only true fjord on the eastern coast of the United States. Fjords, Dr. Borns explains, are formed when the ocean floods a valley that was carved by ice. In most fjords there is a submerged ridge that formed from debris gathering at the ice’s limiting edge, called a moraine [1].
The Last Glacial Maximum is believed to have occurred some 20,000 years ago during which a layer of ice over two miles thick in some places covered the upper half of what is now central and eastern North America. Another layer hunkered along the northwest coast and onto what is now southern Alaska. The middle plains south of these sheets were an icy tundra ravaged by cold and dense winds that gathered over the ice and then plunged down into the slightly warmer and lower pressure plains. Animals gathered along the ice margins and humans gathered around the animals, and there are stories of benevolent glaciers and of glaciers punishing humans for disrespecting the glaciers in certain ways [3, Ch.3].
The next stop, video four, begins among sun-speckled trees and bushes and beside a pond whose water can be heard sloshing in the background [1]. The pond, Dr. Borns tells us, is named after two brothers who built a farmhouse, sawmill, and a dam at the pond’s end. A Pond House still remains that, according to Dr. Borns, serves “wonderful popovers” in the summer. Along the hillsides, we are told, are beach-like edges some 250 feet high that were carved when the ice was receding and the ocean was also deeper by 250 feet.
The suspicion by Europeans that glaciers had once extended far past their 1800s boundaries began with hunters, farmers, and woodcutters who noticed rocks with scars and notches, or boulders whose material did not match the mountain that they now rested on, or fish fossils that were far from great bodies of water. Leading geological scientists at the time insisted that the rocks, boulders, and fossils could be explained by a world-covering flood, and it took the persistence of a few scientists to establish what is now the theory of ice ages [4, Ch. 1-2].
Flash forward to stop number eighteen and we are on a lush green hill with a ridge of boulders in the background. This ridge is an “end moraine” formed by debris spilling over the ice margin. The ice is always flowing downstream, we are reminded, but the margin itself can advance or retreat, depending on rates of accumulation or ablation. The lushness of the surrounding green is from blueberry bushes, which, Dr. Borns informs us, fruit only every other year and are mowed down and regrown in the years in between. The video ends with a reminder that “this is private land” and an admonition not to pick the blueberries because, “you have no right” [1].
This comment would perhaps not be so unsettling if in earlier videos the mountain, the region, and the water bodies had not been called by names given by people with questionable rights to name them. Wapuwoc – “white mountain where the sun first looks” – was the mountain in the first video, Mimuwipon was the pond, and Pihci-cihciqi-pisipiqe was the sound [5, 6]; and they were known by these names for multiple thousands of years before their current references as “Cadillac,” “Jordan,” and “Somes.” The region uncovered by the Laurentide Ice Sheet had a name long before it could even be conceived of being called Maine or the United States: ckuwi – “come here,” ckuwapon – “the sun looks here,” ckuwaponahkik: “the land where the sun first looks our way” [7].
After agreeing that ice ages had occurred, scientists began to ask why such extreme climate fluctuations can happen. The combined effects of eccentricity – the shape of Earth’s orbit; obliquity – the tilt of the axis of Earth’s rotation; and precession – that the plane of axial tilt slowly rotates like a wobbly spinning top, baffled early ice age scientists for decades. Finally, after thirty years of painstaking plotting and calculating, Serbo-Croatian Milankovich produced a model that aligned with mineral and coral reef records. Milankovich had focused on the northern hemisphere, however, and northern and southern hemispheres seem to experience simultaneous ice age effects. The question “why do ice ages occur?” became “why are ice ages global?” which persists today [4, Ch. 3-4].
“It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy,” Leslie Marmon Silko writes in Ceremony, “because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it had to be said a certain way” [8, p. 32]. That was the responsibility of being human, the medicine man Ku’oosh explains to Tayo in Ceremony, “the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said, and this demanded great patience and love.”
Chemical engineer and self-taught linguist Benjamin Whorf argues that speakers of different languages see the universe differently [9, p. 243]. In English we say, “the light flashed,” implying that something has to be there for the light to flash. But, according to Whorf, a Hopi Indian who says “reh-pi,” using one word for the whole performance, no subject, no predicate, no time element, is the better physicist, more aligned with modern field theory.
According to a Wabanaki language speaker, the settlers were shown the “good fishing or meeting spots” of Wapuwoc, Mimuwipon, and Pihci-cihciqi-pisipiqe by the natives. The settlers offered the natives beads and other trinkets, and the natives accepted these trinkets as tokens of the settlers’ appreciation. Then, the next time the natives came, they were not allowed to fish because they had “sold” the land to the settlers.
A volcano erupted in 1996 under Iceland’s Vatnajokull ice cap with an ash cloud reaching 10 km of altitude and a heat transfer equivalent to a WWII-era nuclear weapon being detonated every minute for a week [10]. The volcano quieted but continued melting a fissure under the ice, and this water eventually exploded from the ice with waves 3-4 meters high and a flow rate second only to the Amazon River. No one was hurt, largely thanks to early warning. But other forms of glacial floods have killed thousands of people in Cordillera Blanca and other populated glaciated regions [11].
“They only fool themselves,” Betonie, another medicine man tells Tayo in Ceremony, “… The deeds and papers don’t mean a thing. It is the people that belong to the mountain” [8, p.118].
In the military, “my” rifle is the one I am responsible to keep oiled and clean. “My” barracks room is the one I maintain as inspection-ready. “My” Humvee is the one I am responsible to service regularly. Even “my” body is the one I have sworn to place between my beloved home and war’s desolation. At home, “my” child is the one I am responsible to feed, clothe, and teach and learn from. “My” relatives are those people whom I will help and whom I can count on to be helped by without question. These are all places to which I belong or beings to whom I owe a duty.
Ket nil skicin – I am not native. I tell what I have been told.
Engineers have proposed massive projects to stall glacier outwash and retreat: a multi-mile long submarine barricade could slow melting by reducing warm water contact around fjord-outwash glaciers; a pump station drilled to the glacial bed could remove basal water and slow the glacier’s sliding; an artificial island built under an ice shelf could provide an additional stabilizing pinning point. The multi-billion cost of any of these would rival enormous hydroelectric dams or artificial islands built for airports, but pales in comparison to the multiple trillions per year estimated in global cost if sea levels rise according to certain predictions [12].
Yaq–so they say.
“The liars had fooled everyone,” Tayo reflects in Ceremony [8, p.177], “white people and Indians alike; and as long as people believed the lies they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other… how they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: … thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white… the lies devoured white hearts and for two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness… to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought…
“And always they had been fooling themselves,
and they knew it.”
Sources
(1) Maine Ice Age Trail Map & Guide: Down East. https://iceagetrail.umaine.edu/
(2) Bennet, M. R., & Glasser, N. F. (2009). Glacial geology: Ice sheets and landforms (2nd. ed.). U.S.A.: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
(3) Cruikshank, J. Do Glaciers Listen? First published in 2005 by UBC Press.
(4) Imbrie, J. and Imbrie, K. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery first published in 1976 by Enslow Publishers
(5) Cadillac Mountain Restoration https://schoodicinstitute.org/science/forest-ecology-research/latest-projects/cadillac-mountain-restoration/
(6) Neptune, G., Naming the Dawnland (2018) Abbe Museum publication https://abbemuseum.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/4b8da-namingthedawnlandgeorgeneptune_web.pdf
(7) Personal communication, February 2026
(8) Silko, L.M. Ceremony. 1977. Viking Press.
(9) Whorf, B. (Carrol, J. ed.) Language, Thought and Reality. 1956. Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York.
(10) Schoonmaker, D., 1998. Jöklhlaup. American Scientist 86, p. 426-427.
(11) Carey, M. (2004) Living and dying with glaciers: people’s historical vulnerability to avalanches and outburst floods in Peru.
(12) Moore, J., et al., 2018. Geoengineer polar glaciers to slow sea-level rise. Nature 555, 303-305.