Mendenhall Glacier

The Mendenhall Glacier, formerly called Auke Glacier, located 21 km from the city center, Juneau, the capital of Alaska, away. He is one of the foothills of the nearly 4,000 -square-mile Juneau Icefield, an ice-blue, framed by wildgezackten three thousand world. Its dimensions (67 meters high and 2.4 km wide ) appear small compared to those of the Juneau Icefields. All glaciers of this region have their origin, and Taku, Eagle, Herbert and 38 other large glaciers and about 100 smaller ones.

Due to some climatic conditions in Alaska, the local glaciers do not pull back to the extent that it can be observed worldwide. Again, go back the glaciers, but only by 10 to 15 meters a year. These values ​​are almost at the limit of measurement accuracy. The Mendenhall Glacier is, however, now much smaller than the time of the first explorers in the mid- 18th century saw him: He has since declined by about 800 meters.

The ice at the edge is at least 150 years old. The glacial river has a length of almost 20 kilometers, the glacier tongue is the glacier lake, the Mendenhall Lake, 30 meters high and two kilometers wide. The adjacent Mendenhall Lake is up to 60 meters deep.

The glacier named 1892 U.S. President Harrison in honor of the American scientist Thomas Corwin Mendenhall ( 1841-1924 ), who until 1894 worked from 1889 as superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and the boundary between Alaska (USA ) and Canada monitored, in Mendenhall glacier has to offer.