Mendenhall Glacier
| Mendenhall Glacier | ||
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.jpg) Mendenhall Glacier |
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| location | Alaska ( USA ) | |
| Mountains | Boundary Ranges ( Coast Mountains ) | |
| Type | Valley glacier | |
| length | 20 km | |
| Exposure | south | |
| Altitude range | 1400 m - 15 m | |
| width | ⌀ 1.8 km | |
| Coordinates | 58 ° 30 ′ N , 134 ° 32 ′ W | |
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| drainage | Mendenhall Lake → Mendenhall River | |
| particularities | Glacier edge lake | |
 View from the glacier into the fjord |
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The Mendenhall Glacier , formerly known as the Auke Glacier , is 13 miles from downtown Juneau , the capital of Alaska.
It is one of the foothills of the almost 4,000 square kilometer Juneau Icefield , an ice-blue world framed by jagged three-thousand-meter peaks . Its dimensions (67 meters high and 1.5 miles wide) appear small compared to those of the Juneau Icefield. All glaciers in this area have their origin there, including Taku , Eagle, Herbert and 38 other large glaciers as well as around 100 smaller ones.
Due to some climatic conditions in Alaska , the glaciers there do not retreat as much as can be seen worldwide. Here, too, the glaciers are receding, but only by 10 to 15 meters a year. These values are almost at the limit of measurement accuracy . However, the Mendenhall Glacier is much smaller today than it was when the first explorers saw it in the middle of the 18th century: since then it has receded by around 800 meters.
The ice on the edge is at least 150 years old. The glacial river has a length of almost 20 kilometers, the glacier tongue on the glacial lake , Mendenhall Lake , is 30 meters high and two kilometers wide. The adjacent Mendenhall Lake is up to 60 meters deep.
US President Harrison named the glacier in Mendenhall in 1892 in honor of the American scientist Thomas Corwin Mendenhall (1841-1924), who worked from 1889 to 1894 as superintendent of the US Coast and Geodetic Survey and supervised the demarcation of the border between Alaska (USA) and Canada -Glacier around.
