The Place Where Glaciers Go to Die

Glacier in Vatnajoekull National Park

A lagoon called Jokulsarlon, in eastern Iceland, is now informally known to glaciologists as the place where glaciers go to die. Iceland’s highest mountain, Oraefajokull, overlooks Jokulsarlon. Oraefajokull is covered by the largest glacier in Europe, Vatnajokull (“Glacier of Rivers,” now long-softening). The glacier moves down the mountainside and enters a tidal lake, where it cracks into gigantesque iceburgs, which roll tremendously into the water, bob hugely across its surface for several miles, and then accelerate somewhat diminished into a river that empties into Jokulsarlon. Smacked and warmed by surf as the river indecorously hurries them into the lagoon, the icebergs fracture into pieces and dissolve. You can stand there and watch as the level of the global sea rises.

The beaches of Jokulsarlon are marked everywhere by bits of iceberg, or bits of Vatnajokull, because incoming tides push them temporarily back out of the lagoon and onto the shore. Some are like boulders; some are like pendants. There are fields of them running down the beaches, glinting extensively in moonlight, starlight, and sunlight. As they melt, they release ancient air molecules and ancient water molecules, pressed into stillness six or eight or a thousand or more years ago, when sedimentary snowfalls were building the glacier. These molecules were last abroad when the Maya were building Chichen Itza, the Romani were leaving India for Europe, China was experiencing a Confucian renaissance, Malagasy hunters in Madagascar were exterminating lemurs the size of bears, the Berber king Abu-Bakr was founding Marrakech, and the Vikings were settling Iceland. Some of the molecules were around when Erik the Red set sail from one of Iceland’s young ports on a journey that would end in the discovery of Greenland.

Arctic ice is melting so fast these days that if you were to climb to the top of Greenland’s glaciers in the warmer months, up to the mile-high plateaus, you would see lakes by the thousands: lakes to the horizon. They form when percolating meltwater collects in depressions in the glacial bed, and they have surfaces of several square miles and depths of thirty or forty feet. Anywhere else on the earth these meltwater lakes would be lifestyle-altering topographical features, but up on Greenland’s glaciers they form overnight and disappear in hours: they are little flashes, flourishes of the ice sheet.

Meltwater also turns into rivers, which can converge to make lakes; lakes can conversely spawn rivers. It all depends on what melts when, where. As meltwater rivers cut into the mile-thick ice, they fashion slot canyons and crested buttes and needle spires and fantail overhangs—most of the basic erosion patterns you see in Monument Valley and the Badlands and Canyon de Chelly and the Grand Canyon. The thin serpentine rivers at the very bottom of those hot canyonlands are cloacal and slow; on the glacier, they’re clear blue and fast. Glacial hydrology is not expressed in red and brown and orange and grey; it’s expressed in bright white. Landscapes that are hundreds of millions of years old, landscapes people travel a thousand miles to see, are created on Greenland’s glaciers in seasons, or less. They’re almost as big (Greenland’s glaciers have calved icebergs the size of Yosemite’s El Capitan).

When the rivers find cracks in the ice and bore down into it, their supplying lakes usually follow very quickly. Sometimes icequakes open up a crack in the lake bed and the mass of water crafts the deepest part of the crack into a round-rimmed cylindrical conduit, like a cenote in limestone, and empties itself almost entirely in an hour and a half. It’s a three-thousand-foot drop. At the outset, the force of the downrush is equivalent to the force of water going over Niagara Falls.

Once most of the water is gone, and only cataract trickles remain, you can use climbing ropes to lower yourself into the hole. That’s about as far from the temperate, habitable world as a person can get (and still live). You’re pretty far even from lagoons like Jokulsarlon, to which you are at least connected by globally warmed glacial plumbing. The best way to appreciate your remoteness is not to note the residual waterfalls or thickness of the glacier or fathomless, darkening, frozen cylinder you’re in, but the color all around you. At a certain shallow depth, the hole is illuminated exclusively by sunlight obliquely passing through the ice sheet. The ice absorbs every color in the rainbow except one, a particular incandescent marine blue, a color you can’t see anywhere else on earth.

Sources: NPR: James Balog on Fresh Air, Extreme Ice Survey, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Science Daily, Nova