We’re pretty close to Antarctica here in southern Chile. Antarctica has the largest icefield in the world, followed by Greenland and then the Southern Patagonian Icefields which we went to visit.

Grace on the boat

The biggest glacier we visited here in the Patagonian Icefield is the Perito Moreno Glacier on the Argentinian side of Patagonia; it’s a massive 258 km2. It empties into the Lago Argentino, and we could see how it actually formed an ice damn blocking one part of the lake from the other which makes one side rise 8 meters higher than the other.

Notice the boat? It looks like just a speck near the glacier

And here I am on that boat just a few minutes before

When you see the boat next to the glacier ,you can see how truly massive it is. The front wall of ice goes 50 meters above the lake and 150 meters to the bottom of the lake. It’s around 2km wide where it reaches the lake and stretches back some 32km.

Being so close to such a tremendous view of nature is truly awe-inspiring. We couldn’t stop looking at it and taking pictures of it.

 

The whole setting seemed like it was from a movie or fairy tale. There was a mist hanging over the mountains and the water in the lake was turquoise in color and as smooth and shiny as a piece of glass - until a chunk of ice fell off and sent some ripples through the lake.

 

Whenever a chunk of ice would break and fall into the lake, it would let off a thunderous roar. If you look closely at the picture above, you can see a small chunk falling off and the ripples it generates.

Going up close to the glacier on a boat

Some of the ice was really such a deep blue that it almost didn’t seem real, after all, we always imagine white or transparent ice. But where there were cracks or scratches on the white ice, it seemed to be filled with a deep blue glow.

We would have liked to stay admiring the view all day, but alas we only had a couple hours. The drive from Puerto Natales, Chile, to this glacier in Argentina took the better part of 5 hours each way, and the border closes at 10pm so we had to rush to get back in time.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 11:48 am and is filed under Patagonia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.