Jankers

We arrived in El Calafate with the sole purpose of visiting the Perito Moreno Glacier. We managed to fit in a trip to a nature preserve and some shopping as well.

This glacier is huge! ItŽs 60 meters above the water and 120 meters below. ItŽs 60 km long. ItŽs one of the few advancing glaciers in the world. It moves forward 2 meters per day!

TheyŽve built boardwalks for the crowds to watch the display. Because the glacier is moving so much, pieces of ice are frequently falling into the water. It makes loud cracking noises as it moves and also when the ice hits the water. We saw a lot of šlittlešpieces fall at once and it sounded like firecrackers.

Here is a chunk of ice that fell from the glacier and floated close to shore. The glacier itself is a beautiful blue color. The small pieces of ice floating in the water retain the blue color.

We took a short boat ride to get closer to the glacier. We couldnŽt get too close, because of the danger of falling ice. I preferred just standing on the boardwalks, because the sound of the boat covered up the cracking sounds from the glacier!

Every so often, the glacier reaches the peninsula and blocks the water from one side of the lake from draining into the other side. The water level rises and causes the glacier to melt. It forms an ice bridge so that the water can pass underneath. Then the bridge collapes. They call this process šrupturingš. It happened only 15 days before we visited. You can see in this picture where the bridge would have been. You can also see parts of the bridge still in the water. The last time this happened (before 15 days ago) was 2004 and before that in 1988.

This is the Calafate bush – the plant that the town was named after. TheyŽre all over down here. (MikeŽs getting pretty good with the camera. Lots of practice!)

One more glacier pic.

This is the nature preserve – lots of birds. Well, not in this picture.

Window shopping for dinner. Lamb is really popular here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 11:11 am and is filed under Argentina (&Uruguay). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.