Organization and Evolution of Glacial Machine

摘要

In the present paper, the geographical object of glacier is considered from the viewpoint of general systems theory and cybernetics. In the geographical space, glaciers realize a kind of information processing machine, whose organization principles cannot be educed from the physical properties of the substrate in which it is embodied. The most important laws of glacial machine's functioning and evolution can be formulated as follows: 1) mean velocity of information transport within the machine depends directly (and linearly for the first approximation) on the total reserve of information stored in the machine; 2) the coefficients of this dependency change stepwise in the vicinity of critical values of information reserve, i.e. when the limits of machine's information capacity are reached. In this case glacial machine undergoes qualitative changes, being switched to a new mode of behavior, that is to say, to a new evolutionary level.