LeConte Glacier Blue Ice Magic In the Morning
LeConte Glacier is the southernmost tidewater glacier in the Northern Hemisphere. Since 1994 it has been calving icebergs at a such a remarkable rate that the fjord in front of the glacier has been choked with an armada of icebergs that cruise for miles, ending up in LeConte Bay where they accumulate in the shallows of a 1500 year old terminal moraine. Here, the bergs are grounded at low tide, so it is safe to bring Zodiacs within close proximity of these astonishingly beautiful bits and pieces of ice ripped from the heart of an active glacier. Being glacial ice, the color of the day was blue! As John Muir observed in his Alaskan voyage, the ice shows “shades of blue, from pale shimmering limpid tones to the most startling, chilling, almost shrieking vitriol blue”. Or as somebody said as we peered, transfixed, into a wave-eroded grotto in a huge iceberg—“it’s like a black hole sucking you in, only bluer”.
LeConte Glacier is the southernmost tidewater glacier in the Northern Hemisphere. Since 1994 it has been calving icebergs at a such a remarkable rate that the fjord in front of the glacier has been choked with an armada of icebergs that cruise for miles, ending up in LeConte Bay where they accumulate in the shallows of a 1500 year old terminal moraine. Here, the bergs are grounded at low tide, so it is safe to bring Zodiacs within close proximity of these astonishingly beautiful bits and pieces of ice ripped from the heart of an active glacier. Being glacial ice, the color of the day was blue! As John Muir observed in his Alaskan voyage, the ice shows “shades of blue, from pale shimmering limpid tones to the most startling, chilling, almost shrieking vitriol blue”. Or as somebody said as we peered, transfixed, into a wave-eroded grotto in a huge iceberg—“it’s like a black hole sucking you in, only bluer”.
