Big Bite

Title

Big Bite

Artist

Jon Burch Photography

Medium

Photograph - Digital Capture & Enhancement

Description

What happened here? Was it a bird, a plane, a meteorite strike or what? Nope, nope and nope…

This is a view of the big cirque near the highest part (12,183 feet above sea level) of Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park at the top of the northern Colorado world. These snowfields represent about all that is left of an ancient glacier that carved the bowl shaped depression during the last ice age.

A cirque is an amphitheater like valley formed by glacial erosion. It may also be a similarly shaped land form arising from fluvial erosion.

The concave shape of a glacial cirque is open on the downhill side, while the cupped section is generally steep. Cliff-like slopes, down which ice and glaciated debris combine and converge, form the three or more higher sides. The floor of the cirque ends up bowl-shaped as it is the complex convergence zone of combining ice flows from multiple directions and their accompanying rock burdens: hence it experiences somewhat greater erosion forces, and is most often over deepened below the level of the cirque's low-side outlet and its down slope valley. If the cirque is subject to seasonal melting, the floor of the cirque most often forms a tarn or small lake behind a dam which marks the downstream limit of the glacial over deepening: the dam itself can be composed of moraine, glacial till, or a lip of the underlying bedrock.

A glacier is a persistent body of dense ice that is constantly moving under its own weight; it forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its melting and sublimation over many years, often centuries. Glaciers slowly deform and flow due to stresses induced by their weight, creating crevasses, seracs, and other distinguishing features. They also abrade rock and debris from their substrate to create land forms such as cirques and moraines. Glaciers form only on land and are distinct from the much thinner sea ice and lake ice that form on the surface of bodies of water.

On Earth, 99% of glacial ice is contained within vast ice sheets in Polar Regions, but glaciers may be found in mountain ranges on every continent except Australia, and on a few high-latitude oceanic islands. Between 35 degrees N and 35 degrees S, glaciers occur only in the Himalayas, Andes, Rocky Mountains, a few high mountains in East Africa, Mexico, New Guinea and on Zard Kuh in Iran. The ice in this mountain cirque is located at the top of Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park, northern Colorado. (Where this photograph was made…)

Some digital effects were applied to this original image after the photograph was made. No electrons were harmed during the transition. Ordered images will not contain the FAA watermark.

Image copyright 2019 Jon Burch Photography

Uploaded

August 11th, 2019

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