Perito Moreno Glacier

The Perito Moreno

I had never seen a glacier before. At least, not up close and personal, and certainly not a real live monster like the Perito Moreno!* Most of my glacier experience has been from my living room, sitting in the comfort of the lazy boy chair with a couple of dogs on my lap, watching BBC Earth videos. So nothing prepared me for the immensity and grandeur of the Perito Moreno. Nothing could. There is nothing like being there and realizing that you are a not only a tiny speck in the grand scheme of things, but also a relatively soft, fragile and transient speck. Relative to a glacier, that is. In comparison to the forces that created this massive river of ice, I feel like I have a lot in common with a humble gnat!

Perito Moreno is about 18,000 years old, having been born in the last ice age.
Perito Moreno is 19 miles long and 97 square miles in area, and 3 miles wide at it’s terminus where it dumps into Lake Argentina. The terminal cliff rises 240 feet above the lake level and reaches deeply under the surface as much as 500+ feet below!
Perito Moreno is so massive and heavy that it can dig deep valleys, carve deep gouges into granite batholiths, and transport giant boulders hither and yon, spilling them like a sack of marbles.
Perito Moreno is one of only handful of glaciers that are actually growing, which means that ice and snow are constantly being added to its mass. The growth is offset by frequent calving of icebergs from the face of the cliff. Many people have actually been killed by great shards of ice flying off the face of the cliff.

I, on the other hand, am a mere 59 years young, and weigh less than 100 kilograms. I could scratch at a rock all day and not leave a trace. Once I tried to move a boulder in my rock garden and ended up tearing my rotator cuff and needing 2 surgeries to repair the damage. The idea of getting hit by a flying iceberg sounds dreadful and I was glad that our boat did not get too close to the cliff face of the Perito Moreno Glacier!

One of the most stunning things about the glacier was the intense blue color, especially in the deep crevices on the face of the cliff. The ice seemed to glow with an unearthly magical fire- not the usual warm reds and oranges of a cozy campfire, but cold icy firelight. It was alien and surreal, like something out of a fantasy sci-fi movie: eldritch, sinister, sorcerous, wizard-fire. Glacier fire.

(For more on the significance of the Canal of the Ice Bridge see my previous blog El Calafate & Lago Argentino! )

I asked our knowledgeable Tour Guide why the glacier looked so intensely blue. He looked at me for a few seconds before answering. “It’s complicated,” he said. I waited for more. “It has to do with the spectrum of light. Physics. The ice is very dense. It absorbs every color of light except blue. So the blue gets reflected.” But why does glacier ice do that and not ordinary ice? Was he sure it wasn’t just reflecting the color of the sky? Why blue light, anyhow? I had more questions than he had answers, so when I got home I looked it up on Wikipedia. Here’s what I got:

“Small amounts of regular ice appear to be white because of air bubbles inside them and also because small quantities of water appear to be colourless. In glaciers, the pressure causes the air bubbles to be squeezed out, increasing the density of the created ice. Large quantities of water appear to be blue, as it absorbs other colours more efficiently than blue. Therefore, a large piece of compressed ice, or a glacier, would appear blue.
The blue color is sometimes wrongly attributed to Rayleigh scattering, which is responsible for the color of the sky. Rather, water ice is blue for the same reason that large quantities of liquid water are blue: it is a result of an overtone of an oxygen–hydrogen (O-H) bond stretch in water, which absorbs light at the red end of the visible spectrum.”

So our Guide was right, it’s complicated! I was still curious about why the glacier was blue and not some other color, so I investigated what was meant by “an overtone of an oxygen–hydrogen (O-H) bond stretch”. I took physics in college and have a nodding acquaintance with quantum mechanics. I even made it partway through a biography of Albert Einstein. And so I feel very qualified in stating that the blue color emanating from the deep crevices of glaciers is indeed due to sorcery, and is comprehensible only to a select group of wizards who call themselves particle physicists. But nothing can change the fact that glaciers are simply stunning to behold. And their enormity and power is very, very humbling.

While I was busy shooting my camera away off the left side of the boat, my travel-mate, Jamie, was focused on the Canal to the right. Without warning there was an explosion like cannon fire- a gigantic iceberg was calving off the face of the glacier into the Canal! Jamie kept her finger on the shutter and captured the whole event, and we made a little video out of it, so you can kind of get an idea of the drama. Be sure to imagine also a biting 45 degrees 20 mile an hour wind in your face, and the cracking and creaking of the glacier and thunderous roar of the iceberg breaking loose from the wall as it falls 200 feet into the water! Pretty cool, huh!

After the boat ride we took the bus to the viewpoint at the tip of the peninsula. There the Park system has built an impressive system of walkways, (pasarelas), and observation platforms so that tourists can safely view and admire the glacier and the Canal de los Tempanos. This gave us the chance to stretch our legs and get some exercise, while at the same time being able to even better appreciate the massiveness of the glacier and the mountainous crucible in which it was born. I took a lot of photos and picked a few of the best ones for you.

There is no substitute for being there, but I hope you can get some sense of the awesome power of Perito Moreno Glacier. I, for one, will never look at this planet quite the same way again!

Happy Trails,

Shirley

 

 

*It’s Perito not Perrito. Sorry if I spelled it wrong in a few places. Perito is loosely translated as an explorer. Perrito (with double rr) is a small dog. Perito Moreno Glacier is named after Francisco Moreno, a great human Argentinian pioneer and naturalist, and certainly not a small dog.