Valdez 4 Aug 2019

Because there was so much good stuff today, I am going to break this up into two posts.  First was the  Glacier portion of the cruise.  I didn’t realize that there are over 30,000 square miles of glacier ice in Alaska alone. We sailed out to the Columbia Glacier which was the last of the Alaska Tidewater (reaching the bay) Glaciers to go into a retreat. It has been retreating since 1978.  But still it is still four and a half miles across the front, 200 feet tall with another 600 feet below the bay water level.  It is depositing between 8 and 10 million tons of ice into the bay each day.

The bay is filled with Icebergs of all sizes.  The white parts are the snow that has not had sufficient time to compress yet.  The blue parts are the compacted snow to the point where all the oxygen has been squeezed out of it and the reason it is blue is because the ice absorbs all of the color spectrum except blue which it reflects/radiates.  The black parts are the bottom of the glacier which is grinding up the rocks into powder and mixing with the ice.

We actually visited several glaciers, but this one was the most spectacular.  As an additional interesting fact, in the harbor was the “Saga” crabbing boat which is featured on the show “The Deadliest Catch”.  I didn’t realize how small the boat was until I compared it to the one we went out on the “Glacier Express”.