I. The Southern Alps and Glaciers (9 pages)
These eight pages - see sub-menu to right - cover our travels in the Southern Alps and our visit to the magnificent Fox Glacier and the stunning landscape to and in Milford Sound. They exclude our passage to and through Arthur's Pass which is covered here and here and here.
Glaciers 1: Geomorphology of the Fox Glacier Region
Glaciers 3: Glacial Colonising Plants
Glaciers 4: The Fox Rainforest
Glaciers 5: Kahikatea Swamp Forest
There is a separate section on the mountains, rainforests and glaciation of Fiordland which are all distinct from the Southern Alps.
For more on geology and Glaciation see also
Amazingly (to me at least) glaciers as ice cap or continental glaciers and mountain glaciers cover a 10th of world's land surface.
During the last Ice Age this figure got up to 32% of the land and 30% of the oceans (source).
The New Zealand glaciers are fairly small beer compared to the huge ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. But they are hugely impressive, nevertheless.
My simple calculations suggest that the present Fox Glacier and 32 sq km névé (snow and ice field) are made up of 1.6 billion cubic metres of ice weighing in at 1.36bn metric tonnes. That is an awful lot of ice and an awful lot of weight. (For calculations see my Fox Glacier page.)
