You wouldn't think it's possible to get sick of glaciers. Well, I don't think it is. Over the holidays, we spent nearly three weeks hiking around them, hearing them from a distance, drinking their water, playing with their icebergs, touching and even walking on the things themselves. By the end of it, I was pretty sure I loved them.
Glaciers are so cool (sorry—let's just get the puns out of the way here: what an ice view; glacial profiling is a slippery slope; and all the rest). They are living, flowing mountains that carve spectacular valleys in their wake. They move with a surprising speed that is obscured by their unfathomable massiveness. They meet their watery ends with very audible sighs and groans.
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| And gasps. |
Our first encounter with glaciers was at Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia. We had just set up our tent for the first of many nights camping, when we heard a thunderous rumble in the distance. It was already windy and raining, so we figured we were in for a thunderstorm. We never saw the lightning though. It wasn't until we were on the trail the next day that we realized we had naïvely mistaken for thunder the sound of a glacier calving off chunks of ice big enough to boom echoes across the valley.
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| Once you hear it, it's usually too late to see it. |
Torres del Paine was absolutely one of the most extraordinary places I have been to. Its glacial influence permeates throughout the park and contributes to the stunning diversity of landscapes, colors, and climates that define the Patagonian experience. This is a place where only the most rugged plants and animals endure. Trees' leaves are hearty and arranged in flat layers to resist the shear of the wind. The warm coats of hares and guanacos make them unassuming (and not uncute) survivors.
The ice fields of Patagonia demand their own weather system and revel in its chaos. Water is dispersed in every form. The mountains that were sliced by glaciers in turn become the physical and thermal mass that controls the glacial vapor around them.
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| In other words, these mountains own their clouds. |
The peaks to the right in the above photo are called the Cuernos, Spanish for "horns". Their sharp contrast in color reveals a brutal history of glacial erosion that stripped away darker sedimentary rock to expose an inner granite layer. The peaks are remnants of what was there before the glacier carved its own water slide (literally—friction melts the glacier's bottom layer and the resulting water acts as a lubricant). And these aren't even the peaks that the park is named after, though I personally think they should be. Plant, animal, or rock, this is a place for humility and deference to nature. You get what it decides to give.
Not to be outdone, Argentine Patagonia has such a wealth of glaciers that the flagship park is named Parque Nacional Los Glaciares. It's large enough to be subdivided into a southern section, which features the Perito Moreno glacier shown in the first two photos, and a northern section that is casually known as the Fitz Roy range.
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| Casually sprawling out glaciers around every corner. |
Whereas Torres del Paine greeted us with rain, hail, and snow, Fitz Roy welcomed us with (for the most part) clear and sunny skies. A day of sun in summer in Patagonia means a lot of daylight—about 18 hours of it. It's pretty nice to be able to finish a hike at 11:30pm without having to use a headlamp. We appreciated the extra time, because it gave us a lot more chances to get up close to that magnificent ice.
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| Really close. |
I can't tell you how excited I was to perch myself on the rocky shores of a glacial lake and reach for chunks of iceberg that I could touch and play with (and even eat!). Until I saw it this close, I hadn't realized that the ice was full of bubbles, trapped by imperfectly packed snowfall. Later on, a glacier guide proposed that the air trapped in the ice is purer than that in the current atmosphere, because it predates the Industrial Revolution. A bit romanticized, sure, but there's no denying that those are some really old bubbles.
One of the best parts of the Patagonian experience is being able to dunk a water bottle into any old stream and drink it straight away. It doesn't get fresher or more delicious than glacial melt drunk within eyesight (and earshot) of the source. And the water is so pretty, too, in a way that doesn't quite come out in these photos. It is such a bright and distinct blue, so colored because the glacier has ground up bedrock into particles small enough that they remain suspended in the melt. Those particles, we later learned, are called "glacial flour". Suffice it to say, I became a bit of a geology nerd by the end of this trip.
That's not to betray my training in chemical engineering. In fact, every time I saw a glacier, I thought about my fluid mechanics class and learning about the Deborah number, a dimensionless number that relates the fluidity of a material with the time scale at which the material is observed. Basically, it implies that even solids will flow given enough time. It's a crucial means of reconciling the motion of glaciers—or glass, or plastics, or mountains. Everything is, at last, fluid.
