Glaciers - one of the treasures of the high Arctic. These frozen rivers come in a variety of forms and colours - dense chalky white, wet plaster grey-white, tinged brown or grey-black with rocks or moraine debris and dust, pale aqua to translucent blue.
Two days out of Longyearbyen and we woke to a horizon etched with spiked mountains and sweeping black - and glaciers ..... Stupendous! We all piled in to the zodiacs to get up close. As we neared the glaciers, we also saw a bear plopping from sea to ice floe - awesome but a little terrifying given that what separated him and us looked like a pathway of ice stepping stomes Shudderingly thrilling. But to glaciers .....
It looks so calm out there at the glacier face, a silence broken only by the deep rumbling, grumbling voices of the glaciers and the constant chattering of 1000s of birds, mainly kittiwakes. They cluster close to the face of the glaciers where, in places, ‘rivers’ of fresh water flow from beneath the towering blanket of ice above creating an upwelling of current that pulls fish and small crustaceans close to the surface. Given that smorgasbord, when the birds all rise from the water you know something has happened deep within the ice to spook them. It’s a bit of a warning signal that a calving might be about to happen.
We cruised passed at least four glaciers side by side. Surrounded by the deep thunder of moving ice, it wasn’t surprising that we saw a few lose face! A resounding crack and crash and tons of ice crumple and plummet into the sea causing mountainous waves of water and splintered ice to hurtle towards you. When that happened, our zodiac went from lazily idling along to almost completely flat out as our driver whipped the zodiac around to roar away from the approaching tsunami. Boy oh boy!
Our first glacier. We walked around a sandy ice- and rock-strewn beach to get as close as we could.
Pearly tranquil morning - and yes I know most of my pix are on a slant. It's how I see the world!
There were two bears somewhere in the ice that surrounded us so we kept a careful watch.
This is glacier's face is about 30m high (many were around this height)
This almost clear aqua ‘bergy bit’ was rather stunning against its mother glacier.
As water melts and collects on the surface of the glaciers it is channeled through tunnels horizontal and vertical. Some freezes and appears as blue stripes on the face of the glacier. Some finds its way to the bottom where it acts as a lubricant to speed up the movement of the glacier towards the sea.
This is a favourite pozzy for birds.
This glacier was quite blunt nosed with little evidence of calving. You can see the solid ground it is sliding over.
This is rather like icing oozing over rocky moraine. To the right you can see the smooth surface of a glacier which has incorporated a lot of dust and debris.
We didn’t see many receding glaciers, but this one looked fairly old with its icy moraine mounded along its front.
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