Patagonia

Away from city lights, we flew south to Patagonia.

You know how the long, acute tip of a piece of pie is the best. Patagonia is something like that.

Cradled between staggering peaks of granite and schist lies a 400 kilometer long ice field that spits out glaciers wherever the cradle gaps. Water laden clouds meet no obstructions in this far southern latitude until here, dumping massive amounts of snow onto Andean mountains warmed by volcanic activity.

The results are fast moving glaciers cracking, splintering, sink holing, disintegrating into deep lakes the color of clouds.

Dynamic fast moving glaciers like Perito Moreno move 2 meters a day. A whine and a crack precede a few chunks of ice giving way before something larger happens. Then a deep boom like quarry dynamite and the whole of this face detaches from the main and slides in the water. Its difficult to figure scale but the face hear is 40 meters tall the plume of water is immense, but in comparison to the rest of the glacier its modest. This trick of scales will become a source of constant bafflement in Patagonia.

Several minutes later a chunk of ice about the same as the one that calved floats up from the bottom of the lake. It must have been attached to the piece that broke away. There is a huge difference in ice though, for this ice is deep blue and dense. It looks ancient.