Google Earth pearls #8: River piracy, aaar

Welcome in Alaska, more specifically: welcome at the Kaskawulsh glacier. Glaciers are always quite spectacular from the air, whether it is from an airplane or on Google Earth. I am, however, not showing just a random glacier. Glaciers melt during summer, that's just what they do. As a consequence, there is always a river at the tongue (the bottom part) of a glacier. But, if you look closely at today's picture, you can see two rivers originating at the glacier. A long, long time ago the glacier reached further towards the West and there was only one river. When the glacier retreated, the Northern valley started to tap off the melt water and a second river develops. Apparently, this was quite a spectacular event, and it just happened in 2016. Due to climate change ice is melting and glaciers are retreating and in the summer of 2016, the retreat was so strong that suddenly a new hillside was ice free and as a consequence, melt water is flowing north instead of west. What remains, is a dry river bed with a smaller river. This phenomenon is called river piracy, when one river 'steals' the water from another one. Glacier retreat can be the cause, but also geological or environmental happenings can regenerate the flow of a river. Spectacular, right? Well let's thank ourselves for climate change...

© Google Earth (Landsat/Copernicus)