Europe Travel Destinations

Image source: www.susanmilne.com
Mainly of Alaska’s glaciers are retreating or thinning or mutually, a new book by the U.S. Geological Survey news.

About 5 percent of Alaska’s area is enclosed by more than 100,000 glaciers — that’s about 29,000 square miles (75,000 square kilometers), or more than the entire state of West Virginia.

While a few of Alaska’s large glaciers are advancing, 99 percent are receding, the book, “Glaciers in Alaska,” states. The book was written by USGS examine geologist Bruce Molina.

A USGS project to take pictures of the glaciers of Montana’s Glacier National Park also showed significant retreat. Based on these photos and glacier recession rates, scientists envisaged the park could lose its namesakes by 2030.

Greenland, which is covered by more ice than somewhere else in the world outside Antarctica, has also seen significant melt of its glaciers in recent decades.

The new book on Alaska’s glaciers used satellite images, aerial photos, maps and other studies to document the retreat of the glaciers, which began as early as the mid-19th century. Some glaciers have even disappeared since being mapped in the mid-20th century, the report found.

The account also said that glaciers in Alaska saw “important retreat” in the last two decades of the 20th century.

Chernobyl definitely does not sound like your average tourist destination and one might be even tempted to ask, “Why Chernobyl?”

The accident happened on April 26, 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant when reactor 4 exploded. Since then, the city has become a dead zone, with only a small number of people living in houses marked with signs that say, “Owner of this house lives here”.

There’s nothing much really to see: a ghost town that has become a nature reserve…that’s it. But any traveler who chose to pay a visit to one of the loneliest places on earth will certainly feel that the trip was worth it and that it was a trip that provoked one’s mind and heart.