El Calafate, Argentina: Icy Discoveries

In the mountains in Argentina, close to Chile, is the Parque Nacional Los Glaciares (Glacier National Park). At its South end, is the town named El Calafate, and it is the perfect place to stay if you love snow and ice. That's because it's only an hour or so outside of the third largest glacier in the world, and one of the only ones that's not receding (getting smaller). The glacier's name is Perito Moreno and it is roughly 30 km long, 5 km wide, and 60 m tall.





The glacier formed in a valley in between these Andean mountains, a place where many storm clouds have emptied out their snow. The snow builds up and the pressure of it turns the snow in to ice. Gravity pulls the ice down the hill and the bottom section grabs onto soil and rock as it goes, giving it the look of lines of dirt in it. As it moves, the ice can also crack, creating crevices. The sun warms the ice, and some of it melts, meaning that the glacier sits on a river or lake. When sections melt or crack, it can make parts fall off, into the water, which is really exciting to see!



The other really cool thing is its colour. The glacier looks blue because the ice is very compacted, meaning light has a long way to travel through it. The light refracts (breaks into the colour spectrum) and blue light is the strongest wavelength of colour we can see, so the ice looks blue.




Even though you can't really see the glacier moving because it's going so slowly, you can hear it! It creaks and cracks and groans as parts shift and melt. The really exciting part is when you see a section break off and fall into the water. Because the glacier is so big, it makes some of the chunks look really small. But when you see how big the splashes are that it makes, you realize just how big those chunks of glacier ice are!