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Doomscrolling, but glaciers.
Aletsch Glacier, Vatnajökull, Perito Moreno, Baltoro: Gletscherfreund shows 121 glaciers from 35 countries and territories — from the Alps to Iceland and Greenland, on to Patagonia, the Karakoram and Antarctica. Each one with a satellite image, the numbers that matter and three things you did not know.
SWIPE THROUGH
Tap a glacier to open the satellite image; stay a moment and the measured outline is traced onto it. From there you swipe up to the next one — like any feed, except nobody feels worse afterwards. The list is grouped by country and searchable, and a tap on the text card opens the Wikipedia article.
SHORT VIDEOS
A spoken clip for every glacier, subtitled as it plays: what makes it worth knowing, in half a minute. All 121 have one.
TIME LAPSE
The same glacier year by year, as cloud-free annual mosaics from Sentinel-2. Where outlines from different years exist, they are drawn on top and show where the ice once stood.
MEASUREMENTS
Mass balance and front variation from the World Glacier Monitoring Service database: how much ice a glacier gained or lost in a year, how much is missing since records began, how far the tongue has advanced or retreated. Mass balance goes back to 1885, and the front variation of the Mer de Glace to 1575.
LEARN AND QUIZ
A card box built on the spaced repetition used by vocabulary trainers: the satellite image on the front, the name on the back. What sticks comes back in weeks, what wobbles comes back tomorrow. Plus a quiz of ten unlabelled images, multiple choice or typing — typos are forgiven.
ABOUT GLACIERS
What a glacier actually is, how snow turns into blue ice, which types exist, and how to spot moraines, crevasses and glacier tongues from above. Plus a small glossary from firn to calving.
NO SMALL PRINT
No account, no sign-up, no ads, no trackers. Everything about the glaciers is in the app. Satellite imagery, photos and weather are fetched as you look at them.
Data: WGMS (Fluctuations of Glaciers), GLIMS, RGI, Copernicus Sentinel-2, Open-Meteo. Source and licence are shown wherever the data appears in the app.