Monday, January 12, 2009

Glaciers

It's almost impossible to convey how amazing the glaciers were. Or I'll restate: it is impossible for me to convey. I'm not a very good writer (yet I have a blog!) but no one really reads this so I guess it doesn't matter too much.

I've never really seen another glacier (technically I have but it wasn't glacier-iffic. It just looked like snow.) so I have no basis for comparison. But my friends who have been to Alaska and Norway say that our pictures don't compare to what they have seen (as in what we saw was AWESOME). I've never been to the Himalayas and I don't know what their lake situation is so I could be lying here but I feel confident in saying that Parque Nacional Los Glaciares is like nothing else in the world.

The glaciers are huge, both in how wide their mouths are, and how high they are. They are all very fast moving, meaning it doesn't take long from when the snow falls on the top of the mountain to become the compacted ice that calves off into the lake. Perito Moreno, for example, is super fast - it takes about 400 years. Many glaciers take tens of thousands of years. That's how they find woolly mammoths.

Below are an assortment of photos since I think you can only see for yourself how majestic these glaciers are.


The view from our hotel. It's too foggy, but you
can see the glacier going up in different directions
toward the top of the mountains.



This image makes the glacier look small.
It's at least 150 feet high.
The mountain is enormous.



It's amazing how smooth the 'snout' looks.
This is probably a half a mile wide or more.
Probably closer to a mile.



This is the pressure of the ice buckling
as it hits land. A small peninsula juts
out into the lake and creates two 'snouts'
on the glacier. This is one mouth hitting
that peninsula.



Up close, the glacier looks like meringue.
Look how it goes on and on.



Hopefully this gives an idea of the scale.
The white-ish dots on the mountain, on the left,
is our hotel. The line of ants in foreground is another
group trekking on the glacier. Our hotel was the only
one in the park.

1 comment:

Kelly said...

Awesome, in the true sense of the word.