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Bruce Oliver - Enfield, CT |
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Glacier Bay, AlaskaAug-Sept, 2002Glacier-Bay - MAPThe Hubbard Glacier dropped into the bay, in pieces with a thunderous roar. Just 50 miles north of Juneau, Alaska, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve covers over 3,300,000 acres and can only be reached by boat or plane. Since 1986 the Hubbard Glacier has become one of the most active and fastest moving glaciers in the world, in 2002, it traveled as much as 100-120 feet per day. Earlier in our trip we had the pleasure of landing on the Glacier while visiting Juneau, Alaska more than 90 miles away from Glacier Bay and the Yakutat Bay. It advanced so quickly that it completely blocked off Russell Fjord from the sea and created a fast rising freshwater lake. It was not until a couple weeks before our trip that the dangerous situation in the bay was alleviated when the wall of ice blocking the fjord broke. This allowed the water that was dammed up behind it to flow into the ocean reducing the risk of traveling in the bay. As a result our group was allowed to go closer to the Glacier and any other tour in a longtime and we got as close as ninety feet from the mighty wall of ice.
During our stay in the bay, crew members came out to take photos because this was the first time that the ship got that deep into the bay all summer. We were within 90 yards of the walls of cold ice.
What is a glacier and what makes the glacial ice "blue"?
Glaciers are made up of an accumulation of ice, water, the air and debris
covering hundreds of miles. They have the ability to flow on the thin
layers of water down mountain sides and into oceans.
It takes hundreds of years for glacial ice to form
from six sided snow flakes. Glacial ice crystals can grow as large
as a football. Over time, the snow that accumulates on a ice field
compresses and becomes so dense and devoid of air that it acts like a prism to
reflect only blue light rays, hence the color of blue ice.
When the snow was compressed into glacial ice it changes in form to interlocking
crystals and acts like a prism. The sun's light comes down as white light, but
if you hold up a prism to the sunlight you know it is made up of the wide
spectrum of colors that look like a rainbow. When white light from the sun hits
the glacial ice, it is split into a rainbow of colors.
Glacier ice is very thick and lacks air bubbles so
the only color that has enough energy to make it through the ice is the blue
light. The red, oran
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and yellow light is absorbed within the ice. The blue end of the spectrum and
some of the green and indigo, is refracted back to our eyes. Snow and new ice appear white
because they are less dense. A piece of ice
must be at least a cubic meter in size to absorb
and refract the white light of the sun so what will appear blue. The debris that a glacier picks up as it
moves around mountain peaks and into valleys create the moraines or dark stripes
in a glacier as it moves down a slope (In the picture to the right, you can see
an iceberg with evidence of a moraine in it.). During its downward descent
glaciers grind and pulverize the rocks and soil that it moves over into a fine
powder called glacial silt. As the Glacier melts it carries this silt into
streams and rivers causing them to become cloudy. This condition blinds
the salmon salmon that are its spawning upstream and passing through these
areas; they move upstream only through instinct.
