Summer at the glacier

Yesterday was our first day on the glacier. From the camping down in the valley up to the glacier is a 40 minutes drive, with 1500m, almost a mile, of vertical ascent.

Weather was mostly cloudy. On the way up to the glacier, we passed through the lower clouds, almost like an air plane climbing after take off. Throughout the day we had both warming glimpses of sun and cold gusts of snowfall. The skiing was like summer skiing often is, on the soft and slushy glacier surface.

It’s interesting to study the glacier front. The characteristic layering that you can see in the picture is due to many years of alternating snowfall in winter and surface melting in summer. The bluish core of the glacier can be hundreds or thousands of years old.

The science of glaciers is called glaciology, and is a Hell of a fun and cool subject (literally spoken hehe). There are two main types of glaciers; polar glaciers and temperate glaciers.

Polar glaciers are found only in arctic areas, like the ice caps on Greenland and in Antarctica. The polar glaciers are frozen to the ground, which makes them do fantastic things like surge.

Temperate glaciers are “warm”, in the sense that the base is always at the melting point, and water is flowing underneath. The glaciers in the Alps, on Iceland, and in Winterland are temperate glaciers, including the one we are skiing on these days.

The weather forecast for tomorrow is superb, and I will try to take a nice picture to show you >:)