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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2012
Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated …
William Wordsworth
MOUNTAIN GLACIERS
In the mid-18th century, the grand tour of Europe was the aim of many wealthy young Englishmen, and no tour was complete without a visit to at least one of the famous Swiss mountain glaciers. The glaciers had been made a tourist icon by an amazing 1.85 metre-wide photograph of the Lower Aar Glacier taken in 1858 by Auguste-Rosalie Bisson and shown at the Paris Exposition of that year. The photograph showed the fractured and crevassed glacier winding its way down the valley.
Stereo-pair photographs were also popular in the 1850s, and the glaciers did not miss out. The Lower Grindelwald Glacier was photographed in stereo in 1858, by which time it was known that glaciers actually moved. The pioneering naturalist Louis Agassiz had discovered this when he saw how a hut built on a pile of rocks in the middle of a glacier had moved downhill. Agassiz also understood that great piles of rocks left across mountain valleys, often acting as natural dams, marked where the end, or snout, of a glacier had been in earlier times.
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