Glaciers – ice on the move
Hacking his way up the brittle flanks of Linda Glacier, alpine guide Charlie Hobbs leads his climbing partner towards the summit of Mt Cook, New Zealand’s highest peak. Vast snowfields that lie within...
Hacking his way up the brittle flanks of Linda Glacier, alpine guide Charlie Hobbs leads his climbing partner towards the summit of Mt Cook, New Zealand’s highest peak. Vast snowfields that lie within...
The record of the Earth’s past climate has been frozen in ice bound up in ice sheets and glaciers on land, and floating on the seas in great ice shelves. Cores extracted from this ice tell an alarming...
Retreating glaciers and thinning snow and ice are the future of New Zealand’s mountains. Climate change is predicted to warm the country’s atmosphere by 1–4°C by the end of the century, altering...
You’ve hurt yourself in the mountains, and you’ll never make it out on your own. What happens next?
Virginia Woolf documents our melting glaciers.
As temperatures around the world slowly rise, glaciers steadily retreat. New Zealand has over 3000 glaciers in its mountains, among them two of the fastest moving, most accessible and spectacular in the...
A razor-edged summit crest that slices across the heavens for almost two kilometres crowns New Zealand’s highest mountain. Aoraki/Mt Cook’s icy flanks (viewed here towards the south from Mt...
Franz Josef is a town in jeopardy—it straddles the Alpine Fault and the Waiho River, and its tourism income has cratered. Who’s responsible for moving it out of danger? And where should it go?
Trevor Chinn pioneered the study of New Zealand’s 3162 glaciers.
This alpine hut on the West Coast was set up to house glaciologists, but as the ice has melted, it has been sought out by intrepid trampers.
Early promotion of mountain tourism.
Acrobatic flying is as much an expression of personality as of skill. Here, Wolfgang Wimmer delights in the G-forces associated with tumbles and spins.
Petr Hlavacek is in his element
On 26 April, 1989, Michael Abbott stepped into the surf off Farewell Spit, completing the first full-length traverse of the South Island. In 130 days the 29-year-old architect had walked 1600km, crossed...
Twenty-five years ago I sat on a headland above Lake Argentina, in Patagonia, and watched pillars of ice 60 m tall fall off the Perito Moreno Glacier. As one fell only every half-hour or so, I had to be...
A chance discovery at the base of New Zealand’s most treacherous mountaineering ascent raised the prospect of a decades-old mystery finally being resolved.
The face of mountain climbing in New Zealand is changing. As glaciers retreat, access to our high peaks becomes more difficult and, in some cases, near impossible. Climbers are pioneering entirely new...
ICE. At one extreme, it is the humble cube which puts the clink in your drink on a hot summer’s afternoon. At the other, it is a major cog in the engine which drives the world’s weather. Furthermore,...
As glaciers retreat, they lose invisible ecosystems formed of microbes—before we’ve had a chance to get to know them. Bacteria thrive just about anywhere, but nobody has investigated the microbiome...
A snap cold spell transforms a waterfall on Wye Creek, near Queenstown, into an icicle cascade, and beckons a special breed of adventurer-the ice climber-to its cold clutches. New formations like this...
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