Pic of the Day (2019-02-28): Fading Winter, Receding Ice, and Lost Sleep

Here in South Mississippi it appears that Winter has largely ceded the environment to an early Spring, but with emphasis on precipitation. There does seem to be a LOT of water available up in the atmosphere. Those observations are my excuse to post this POTD of a receding glacier. Sadly, that is the current state of all glaciers. I was reminded of this by looking at my location for this pic on Google Earth, which indicates my position well within the glacier ice. Why? Google Earth’s current imagery of the area (as of this writing) is four years previous (2014-08-02) to the photo (2018-07-11), when the glacier was significantly more extended. You can see this too by zooming way in on the “South Sawyer Glacier” item in the map of POTD sites (note that the icon is where the camera was when the picture was made).

This is the South Sawyer Glacier, at one of branches at the end of Tracy Arm Fjord, some 30 miles south of Juneau, Alaska. The blue color of glacier ice is pretty cool . . . but I am not sure this pic does the scene justice.

So, I resolved to attempt to get a panoramic picture up on this blog, but discovered it is not so easy (without a more expensive account plan). Here is the pic I want in panoramic form (it looks decent on a wide computer screen, but not so much on a cell phone):

Turns out WordPress has a virtual reality image option, but this looks weird unless you have a VR headset on:

Facebook has a pretty decent panorama system, but you must upload from your phone which is pretty difficult if you make any serious edits or cropping. I hoped to beat the WordPress limitation by embedding the Facebook pano here. But, alas, you must click on it and go to Facebook for the panoramic action:

Oh Well. So here is a bonus pic of the North Sawyer Glacier. It is a little grimier with a more variegated blue light refraction, but has a more dramatic backdrop. I’ll not even attempt a panorama:

In summary:

• It is getting warmer and glaciers are receding
• There is too much water in the air in the southern USA
• I cannot make panoramic pics work as 360-degree panoramas in my blog without a more expensive plan
• I spent way too much time trying to work around the problem instead of working on stuff I really need to do
• Glaciers have a blue appearance . . . and are really cool (in case you didn’t get the bad pun above)
• Glaciers are disappearing at an alarming rate
• You should go see them before they (and you) are gone
• This post was mostly an excuse to play with the options and get a pic from Alaska on my POTD map

Thanks for looking!

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