Article: The big melt; Alaska's Mendenhall Glacier is the most visited chunk of ice in North America. Now, Peter Fish reports, Mendenhall's fans are asking: how long will it last?(Mendenhall Glacier)

It's a place you won't forget. You stand on a wide ribbon of ice, a white tongue that laps the mountains to the north and south. The surface that from a distance seemed smooth as a dance floor reveals itself to be violently broken, creviced, torn. The colors, too, are unsettling. Snow white, but also brown, from rock scraped from the mountainsides. And an eerie aquamarine, seeping out from fissures as if the ice were glowing with chill life.

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This is Mendenhall Glacier, which flows out of the mountains above Juneau. About 13 miles long, at points 2,000 feet thick, it is by no means the largest of Alaska's tens of thousands of ...

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