After The Glaciers

Duration:

Year Published: 1975

Complete Record: During the four periods of ice advance and retreat, glaciers covered much of Europe, Asia and half of the United States. Though moving imperceptibly, glacial ice reshaped continents scooping out valleys and pilling up rocks. Ten thousand years ago as the earth warmed, the glaciers began to melt, pouring water back into the ocean and revealing stretches of barren land. But in a short two hundred years, there stood a lush rain forest. What had happened? Land, once covered by impenetrable snow and ice, now lay exposed for birds to drop seeds on. Lichens, mosses, and other small plants flourished. Nitrogen, manufactured by a flower, the mountain avens, replenished the soil enabling birch and bushy alder to row. In the natural stages of plant succession, willows, cottonwood and spruce thrived, climaxing in towering hemlock trees. Wildlife - deer, owls, raccoons and bears - returned. No one knows if the ice will reappear, but fossil trees left in the area are evidence of an ice advance just 3,000 years ago. A slight shift inn the winds, a change in ocean currents or a barely noticeable drop the barren ravaged surface of a vast Alaskan glacier to the shoreline and then back to the mountains - the glacier’s source, it documents this evolutionary process. The closing sequence of the film illustrates the glacier's savage power as whole cliffs of ice are torn off and hurled thundering into the sea. Shows how much of the northern hemisphere surged back to abundant life during the periods of ice age retreat. Follows the pattern of plant succession, from lichens, to mosses, to a forest. (WorldCat)