I've still a passing interest in geology, which I studied to a greater or lesser extent at university in Sheffield. We would look down microscopes at slivers of rock under UV light and ask what we were doing with our lives.
But glaciers are the sort of thing you don't pay attention to until they're knocking at your door; as they did in the last ice age when Britons lived on top of hills because there was nowhere else to go unless you liked ski-ing.
They are big though, and not something you want to be near when bits break off ~ as they are beginning to do with alarming regularity. They also however feed ways of life downstream that has existed for practically centuries and upon which we've come to increasingly rely.
There used to be a formula amongst Fleet Street as I recall when calamities would be reported were a Briton involved, three Europeans or a hundred plus from some other part of the world... or something to that effect. Or as John Donne would have said, 'Ask not for whom the bell tolls, but get yourself a cappuccino instead.'
Accordingly the focus has been on the drying out of the Colorado River basin, driven by a paucity of snow in recent years in the Pacific north-west of the USA. Snow will either melt, or accumulate to form glaciers under pressure of its own weight besides temperatures remaining stubbornly low for long enough.
But I flew a spell in Cambodia at Siem Riep where you could see the jungle temple that Lara Croft brought into every home; or drink a pint of lager in town for 25p and treat yourself to a fried scorpion on a stick.
To vary this routine we'd cruise the Tonle Sap, a giant lake that disappears and reappears each year with each monsoon. Here we'd learn that there are over four hundred types of rice ~ not just Uncle Ben's ~ and enjoy cocktails that proved to be an endless supply of rum and coke.
But these water-courses relied not so much on the rain falling during that monsoon so much as snow-melt from the Hindu Kush... I think that was it, though it may have been a restaurant I went to in Manchester.
Flying when in Türkiye though I'd hire a car days off and visit any number of Roman towns, invariably a few miles inland from the seaside whereas once they will have been on it. Walking there, what stands out is that lack of water flowing where once it must have done practically everywhere: like Venice in Vegas on a power-cut.
For what does for civilisations everywhere is not so much what we might guess, so much as a simple lack of water.
Have a good weekend.
Only one in the pic, but flying over China you have to ask what's with the blue roof?
