Deserts, Glaciers, and Climate:
Landscapes and Changes

Deserts, Glaciers, and Climate: Landscapes and Changes It is no great mystery that the Earth is always changing. Talk of global warming is inescapable, making it a moral imperative to become educated about the Earth’s climate cycles and watch for changes and signs in Earth’s diverse landscapes. The following is a brief sketch of desert and glacial landscapes, as well as a look at historical and future climate changes.
Deserts VS Glacial Landscapes Desert and glacial landscapes are very much on opposite sides of the landscape spectrum; however in terms of adjective depiction they are related: “abstract, beautiful, immense, remote ... and vulnerable” (Murck, Skinner, & Mackenzie, 2008, p. 376).
Deserts
The desert landscapes are primarily fashioned by wind and sand, however they are truly defined by the region’s annual rainfall. The landscapes in the desert are full of sand, alluvial fans, playas, oases, arroyos as well as deposits of salt. Eolian, better known as wind erosion, is the type of erosion seen in the desert. Desert is constantly altered and changing based on the direction of the wind. A highly noticeable example of a changing geological feature in a desert landscape would be the dunes. Dunes are hills or ridges of sand that are produced when the wind blows. These mounds of sand are irregular, yet they come in five common types, barchan, transverse, star, parabolic, and longitudinal. One way that deserts form is by desertification, the movement of desert conditions into non-desert regions such as the case in Northern China (China Desert, n.d). With areas like that of Northern China in a delicate balancing act to maintain its ecosystem, even minor stresses by human (anthropogenic) or natural forces can become too much to tolerate, thus a degradation of the land results. According to Murck et al. (2008), “the majority of desert lands are not covered by sand. Water erosion is an important geologic process in deserts. Flash floods carve deep canyons called arroyos and create depositional landforms such as alluvial fans” (p.411). This relationship with water alone makes a desert landscape comparable to a glacial landscape because glacial landscapes are predominantly formed by water.
Glacial
A huge factor in the formation of glaciers is advance and retreat. Ultimately formed by receding water from glaciers, this landscape can have any number of different types of depositional land forms, such as unsorted tills, drumlins, moraines, eskers, delta kames, kettles lakes, and plains (Glaciers, n.d.). When the glaciers move across this landscape, they abrade it thus helping to form the landscape by producing glacial striations and grooves. Routinely, the glacier will deposit sediments that will make landforms such as moraines. This ridge or pile of left behind glacial debris allows geologists to identify previous glacial retreats and disappearances. Another geological feature that is caused by melting glaciers are kettles. These features are formed after the water recedes and depressions are left behind. These kettles can end up filling with water and becoming lakes (Glaciers, n.d.). On an interesting note, the lands that were once draped by large glaciers during the previous ice age are still ‘rebounding.’ This rise is because of the isostatic or post-glacial rebound of the surface of the earth owing these effects to glaciations, thus once the weight of the ice is removed the land begins to raise (Bluemle, 2005). Understanding both desert and glacial landscapes is essential, since they are vital indicators of climate change. Global Climate Change “Earth’s climate system is complex, comprising multiple interacting parts and subsystems in a state of dynamic equilibrium” (Murck et al., 2008, p.403). Like an intricate puzzle, scientists have been able to use numerous stand-in measures of climate (ice core samples, layered sediments, frozen pollen spores, glacier deposits, as well as studying Earth's orbital changes around the sun) to ‘piece together’ a picture of the Earth's climate dating back anywhere from recent decades to many as a million years ago.
Climate Change: Past to Present Since the formation of the Earth, tectonics has had a vital role in the changes of climates in the planet. Throughout the past two million years, the Earth has experienced over 20 things know as ice ages. Over the past ten thousand years, the melting glaciers and ice caps as well as the sea levels rising and the Black Sea flooding are all from the Holocene period that followed the last ice age. One thousand years ago, paleoclimatic records show a ‘Little Ice Age’ in Europe that caused huge volcanic events as well multi-decadal droughts in many different areas of the world. Beginning with the Industrial Era, an additional ‘warm period’ has emerged in the last one hundred years, coinciding with human population growth and exponential amounts of carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere (NOAA, 2005). Murck et al. (2008) writes that “the overall trend in cooling has led to a period in the last 800,000 years with pronounced alterations, each about 100,000 years, of ice ages or glaciations, followed by warm interglacial periods” (p. 404). What seems to becoming clearer is that despite the fact that the Earth is nearing the peak of a warm ‘interglacial’ cycle; the addition of the human Industrial Era into the scenario has exasperated the speed or possibly the severity of this current period creating a ‘super-interglacial period.’ Coming Century of Climate Change With most predictions comes great uncertainty, this is no different when it comes to predicting what impact the climate change will have over the coming century. If temperatures continue to rise at the current rate, the ice sheets will start melting thus bringing a detrimental rise in the sea level. This rise will spark unprecedented flooding and heat waves across the globe. As the climate warms the hydrologic cycle may be intensified, this will lead to an extraordinary demand for freshwater, aggravating existing regional shortages, and even the possibility of war-like conflict between nations over fresh water reserves. The changes to Earth’s deserts and glacial landscapes show that the climate change is a worldwide problem, only through international cooperation and response to the issues at hand.
Earthly Challenges
Knowledge is undeniably power, recognizing the way that certain landscapes like that of deserts and glacial regions form and the part they play when it comes to signifying climate changes is crucial. The full scope of the consequences that will come with the future climate will without doubt surprise humankind. Climate change is inevitable; the ‘health’ of the climate system is however very much within the power of human hands.

References
Bluemle, J. (2005). Glacial rebound, warped beaches and the thickness of the glaciers in
North Dakota. Retrieved from: https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/ndnotes/Rebound/Glacial%20Rebound.htm Glaciers. (n.d.) [Animation]. Retrieved from: http://www.wiley.com/college/strahler/0471480533/animations/ch20_animations/glaci ers.html

Murck, B. W., Skinner, B. J., & Mackenzie, D. (2008). Visualizing geology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (2005). Climate timeline summary. Retrieved from: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl/#