Wednesday, 14 June 2017

Alaskan Glaciers

I'll be treating our trip to Alaska thematically, dealing first with glaciers, then with wildlife, thirdly with stark landscapes, fourthly with frontier settlements, fifthly with cultural artefacts and then finally with a stately home!

To be blunt, some of the most awesome features of the cruise were glaciers, as these pictures will hopefully show. Here's a map of the huge (1,500 sq mile) Juneau Icefield with the Mendenhall Glacier which we visited snaking downwards about halfway down the southwest flank.


And here was our first glimpse of it from a nearby road.


Now we're closer still at the viewing platform outside the National Park HQ and some slivers of ice could be seen floating downstream.



I took the trail that led towards the snout and saw some more berglets floating downstream. There were also striated rocks en route, obviously reflecting an earlier period when the ice was higher.




A few hours later we were back out to sea and passed by several glaciers, whose names I do not know, reaching the coastline. Here are three of them:




And here, 60 degrees north, the Oosterdam approaches the Hubbard Glacier in the distance. Remarkably our large vessel was able to approach quite close to the front. We also hear some astonishing statistics about the volume of ice entering the sea. In fact, most of the glacier's front is hundreds of meters under water, and when the iceberg calves the height of the ice tilting into the fjord is equivalent to a 14 storey building. We did not encounter such an imperilling event.


As we silently and slowly approached, the ice front became tinged with blue and berglets floated past.






Lots of passengers roamed the decks with their cameras seeking the best views, but the one I liked most revealed an interesting aspect not previously visible. The glacier hitting the fjord actually merged two separate glaciers, one coming from the left and the other from the right. And the mountains spawning these glaciers were apparently higher than the Swiss alps.



Altogether, this was a monumental and challenging landscape. As you can imagine, it was also not very warm!

AS

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