You can hear them coming to get you
Just a little more snowbound fun before we head north. We went to watch the Morreno Glaciar (not named after the man who found it, but someone who got 25km away before giving up) come to smash us into little bits.
The glaciar moves forward at a rate of 2metres a day, and as a result bits of it drop off on the front face into the lake. But the whole time the enormous expanse of ice is groaning and shreiking and banging like a ghoul in a biscuit tin, until CRACK! A bit at the front sheers off.
It’s like watching a cooling tower fall (an experience I presume was shared by everyone in their childhoods); the bottom seems to stay still as the top crashes straight down into and around itself, making a huge cloud of ice. And a hell of a noise. A hell of a long noise too.
The ice hits the water where is boils and foams and sheers off against itself for literally minutes after the fall, and eventually spreads out in circles.
I would show you a photo of one of them happening (there are a lot) but I was too busy watching in awe to want to follow the event through a viewfinder. You’ve seen the Palin programmes about it, anyway. Have a picture of the ice being more still:
Saf - El Calafate, Argentina
Location, South America | saf | 
September 15, 2009 11:52 am
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By Alex W, September 21, 2009 @ 12:20 pm
This is awesome.
I think glaciar is spelt glacier.
Also, how tall is that sheet? To me it looks like about 1 metre, but I presume in fact it’s massive.
By Saf, September 21, 2009 @ 1:36 pm
It´s 60m tall, the size of a 15-storey building apparently. Sadly I can´t show one with people for scale because they are not allowed near it in case the ice drops off. There´s one with a boat somewhere though…
Looks like I picked up the Spanish spelling by accident. Fail.