Perito Moreno glaciar

The glacier was amazing. The ride out to it was pretty special, initially across some wide plains with spectacular mountains in the distance.

Then, for the last 30km or so, the road weaved along the north shore of the Brazo Rico river. There were regular signs telling you to watch your speed. I think partially to prevent people from enjoying the road too much as it can get icy in the shade, and partially so that you don't just drive off the side of the hill, slack-jawed when you come across a view of the glacier like this:

It's difficult to get a sense of scale, but from the port on the right of the image, to the face of headland opposite the glacier is about 2.5-3km. I was told that the face is 5km wide (it's on two sides) and the glacier is up to 60m tall.

One of the reasons the Perito Moreno glaciar is famous is that it's advancing, the other is that it's easy to get to to look at. This is because there's a headland opposite on which they've made various walkways. What happens when the glacier reaches the headland? Well, it blocks the Braco Rico river, which flows clockwise in the map below out of the north to Lago Argentino. The river then undercuts the glacier, creating an ice arch, which then collapses, in quite a spectacular fashion (called a rupture).

As well as the walkways (which have a good view of the north side of the glacier) you can take a boat which gives a better view of the south side of the glacier (below), and gets you a bit closer, about 300m we were told.

While we were there we saw a couple of big chunks of ice fall. I managed to get one on film below. You can kind of get a view of scale from the time it takes the ice to fall and the size of the wave that it creates.

I thought that this big piece was going to fall (it's on the right hand edge of the photo above). It was in the sun and you can see the water streaming off it at the bottom.

Sure enough, it did fall about an hour later when I was on the headland. I saw it but (typically) had just put my camera away. I did manage to catch one more ice fall though (below).

It was a beautiful place to spend a couple of hours. I get the impression that during high season the place gets very busy (given the number of walkways), but it was fairly quiet when I was there and the weather was stunning.