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Thursday, July 30, 2008
3:04PM
Skagway, AK

Yesterday’s cruise into Glacier Bay was nothing short of amazing. My eyes wanted a shut-eye after lunch, but the mountains and glaciers we were passing begged me to come look at them. The Coral Princess finally parked itself about a quarter mile from Margerie Glacier for an hour of awesome viewing.

Before this trip, I was quite familiar with the term “glacier,” but I had never taken the time to ask myself what exactly one is. A glacier is basically a frozen river of ice. They carve themselves down through a mountainscape to meet the sea and are usually growing forward or retreating. Margerie Glacier is apparently retreating at about 3’ per day.

The large glaciers are indescribable as to their size. Margerie is roughly 250’ tall and perhaps a quarter of a mile wide. The glacier landscape is like an optical illusion—because it’s so gigantic, you can’t quite tell how far away you are until a nearby seagull flies toward the glacier’s bookend mountains where they become very, very tiny specks of white.

We were extra lucky, while viewing Margerie, because she calved a number of times. Calving is the term used for when ice breaks off of a glacier. A couple of good-sized chunks broke off causing the viewers to ooh and ahh, but then a very large piece (I wouldn’t be surprised if it was hotel-sized) came crashing down causing a large enough wave that even caused the ship to rock. Calving creates loud, crisp cracking noises when the ice breaks free of the glacier; being so far away and having the sound travel the distance to our ears, it actually seems as though the noise comes from the ice’s contact with the water. By the time we left Margerie, hundreds if not thousands of new icebergs had been born and created a fan of ice from the glacier’s cliff.

The ship continued back the way we came and turned into an inlet for a viewing of the Johns Hopkins and Lamplugh Glaciers, both also amazing to behold. I probably took more photos of glaciers and mountains that anyone wants to see which goes to show that you really have to be here to experience the grandeur of it all.

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