Credit: Aaron L. Berger, 2006
Photograph of a pair of glaciers on the leeward flank of the St. Elias orogen. For the last few million years, this spectacular mountain range has been covered by vast ice fields and glaciers, leading to some of the fastest modern erosion rates on earth. Over the last few decades, the impact of climatically driven erosion on mountain formation and evolution has been a topic of considerable scientific debate. "Based on our research, the onset of intense glacial erosion is believed to have forced a structural reorganization of the orogen, supporting model predictions of orogenesis with real-world data," said Aaron Berger.