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This glacier, Margerie glacier, is located deep in Glacier Bay National Park. You can't walk there, or take a train, bus, or automobile. A ship or a plane will do. The picture to the left is the view of Margerie Glacier that we had while sailing toward it from a distance.
I was on the Holland America Line ship, the Statendam.
Here is the National Park Service site on Glacier Bay. If you click your way around in this site, then sooner or later you will find this map. Way up toward the upper left, you will find Tarr Inlet with Margerie Glacier flowing into it. It is right next to a very dirty glacier called Grand Pacific Glacier the terminus of which is just about on the Canadian border. It is also fun to find them on this satellite image.
Grand Pacific Glacier is just to the right of Margerie from this point of view.
The second picture down is part of the dirty one, Grand Pacific Glacier. You can also see a little bit of Margerie on the left of this image. The picture below that is a closer look at the left side of Grand Pacific.
Mostly what you see in these pictures an "end moraine" in front of Grand Pacific. That consists of a lot of dirt and rock dropped by the glacier as it melted in this position. It is the real dark pile of stuff on the right side of the lower picture. But you can see some dark, dirty glacier ice above and to the left of the moraine. The one coming in from the left is a side glacier called Ferris Glacier. The one in the background is part of Grand Pacific.
The closer you get to it, the more complicated it looks.
Would you like to take a walk on it???????
And how about that reflection?
By the way, the junk in the water is ice that has fallen off.
And I don't want to walk on it!!! (It does not look structurally sound.)
And by the way, do you see that piece of the glacier that looks like a little flap has been folded to the front? It is at the bottom of the picture just to the right of the center. That piece fell off while I was watching. See below for pictures.
Margerie Glacier is a "Tidewater Glacier", which means that it ends in some arm of the ocean where tides are important. Such glaciers are often limited by "calving", or having pieces -- sometimes big ones -- fall off.
You can never be sure just when a glacier will start to calve or how long it will last. It comes in fits and starts. When I was at Margerie Glacier, it was really having a fit with pieces, big and small, falling into the water every few minutes.
So to the left you can see a landslide of ice falling into the water.
There is a cracking noise and a sound a little like thunder when ice breaks and falls. But you can't wait until you hear it to look or to try to take pictures. It takes the sound a little time to reach you; by the time you hear it the event is over.
