Blue Ice

Winter has arrived in full force here on the southern coast of Iceland. As a result of the wild and windy weather; work was cancelled for the day and now I’m sitting at home in bed typing up a new blog post. Much has changed on the glacier since the last entry – it has grown in certain spots, melted away in others, but most obviously it has changed its colour from white to a spectacularly luminescent shade of turquoise blue.

While the ice just below the surface of the glacier stays blue year round, it is only in the winter time (or months where the temperature is below 0°C) that the surface ice of the glacier turns blue as well. The reason for this is that glacial ice is much denser than the average ice cube in your freezer. Over many hundreds or thousands of years the immense pressure pushing down on the different ice layers compresses it and forces out air bubbles that were inside of it. Ice, much like water, in large quantities has a natural blue colour due to it absorbing all the colours of the visible spectrum except for blue (and some violet), which are reflected back giving it the colour you may notice in my photographs. In the summer time when the temperature is above the melting point of ice, more and more air bubbles enter the exposed ice giving it a whitish colour due to light being scattered upon entering the upper layers of the glacier. If all of this is too confusing you may find this and this a bit more helpful!

In regards to our touring season – everything still is going ahead as normal. We still do glacier hikes in addition to climbing trips, the only difference now is that we have to start the day in utter darkness and by the time we finish the day – you guessed it – it’s dark again. Our daylight hours here last about 6 hours at most, though it is quite hard to see the sun as it rarely peeks above the horizon. Fortunately it’s only a matter of 2 weeks until the winter solstice is here and then after that our days will start to get longer again!

So I’m sure you are here mainly to see the most recent photographs – so here they are: