A world of stark contrasts and weird patterns painted on snow, ice and water. The sea ice with its many shades of ‘white’, depending on thickness and density, bleeds into aqua blue particularly for those dense ice chunks calved from glaciers. All around us silence but for the constant quiet popping and crackling of millions of ancient air bubbles released from millions of pieces of fossil ice as they melt little by little in the sea water. Just as an aside, they have been able to analysis the air in those bubbles to estimate the age of the glacier/iceberg.
Closer to glaciers, the ice floe and ‘bergy bits’ contain dirty smudges as well as rocks big and small, pulverised moraine gathered by the creeping glaciers as they slowly grind their way down to the sea. All this floats on a mirror smooth sea - we were so fortunate with the weather. Icy but calm.
Those ripples were caused a couple of curious seals who kept popping up to check us out as we slid quietly by.
Our trusty little ship is ice strengthened, but we got to a point where the pack ice was simply too thick to keep going forward.
There were polar bears out there but too far off for a good look. We tracked them as far as we could.
Adrift, floating in a sea of silence, total tranquility broken only by the crackle and pop of ice fragments and the occasional call of sea birds.
We were very fortunate to have a glaciologist and geologist on board - Ulyana Horidyskyj. She made sense of so much.
We all got sore backs and stiff necks from doing the ‘zodiac twist’ hour on end. It was worth it!
That layer of mud was revealed when the overlying ice melted away. The water around such blocks was like chocolate milk.
Svalbard is covered by 8100 square km of ice cap, 700m thick. Together with the many glaciers, Svalbard loses 4.5 million tons of melt water per hour. Staggering! Greenland which is considerably larger loses 3-4 times that amount. The ice cap can be seem at the top like a thick slab of royal icing.
Zoom in and you can see water pouring out of the ice cap feeding into this giant waterfall.
This runnel was formed by ice and water coursing down the mountain side grinding up and throwing out small rocks and gravel as it went.
Remnant snow left over from the winter has a coating of pink algae. We saw others with green coatings.
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