Ice World

"The ice is near, the solitude tremendous - but how calmly all things lie in the light! How freely one breathes! How much one feels beneath oneself! " Friedrich Nietzsche, 1888

There is always something surreal about ice landscapes. Your brain tries to make sense of them, but the repetitive uniformity and endless defy logic. After a while it seems like your staring into a giant fractal; a truly humbling experience. At its terminus the Perito Moreno Glacier has an average thickness of 170m (558ft); the contorted ripples on the surface are between 30 and 60 m (98 and 195 ft) high. The climbers in the first shot help provide some scale. The glacier makes up a tiny fraction of the Southern Patagonian Icefield which with a total area of 12,363 km2 (4,773 sq mi) of ice is the third largest body of fresh water in the world (after the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets). As the planet continues to warm up, the ice sheet is melting at an alarming rate and has retreated over 10km since Nietzsche wrote those words in his final book Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is.

The shot below is of a large section of ice that was under stress, and fracturing, from nearby part of the glacier not far from here. The extreme brightness of the ice, capable of causing snow blindness in a short period of time, has silhouetted out the sky. Argentine Patagonia, Argentina