Ice Rivers by Jemma Wadham

Author:Jemma Wadham [Wadham, Jemma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141994154
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

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IN THE SHADOW OF GLACIERS

5. Beware of the GLOF!

Patagonia

In the wilderness, sheltered by just a thin skin of canvas stretched taut a foot or two above your head, you may not sleep a wink, and you may feel spooked by peculiar crashes and rumbles in the darkness – but you’ll also feel connected to something much, much bigger than yourself. Who knows what this bigger something is, let alone what it’s called? All that matters is that as human beings we seem to crave a connection with it. For me, Patagonia was about reconnecting with myself and with glaciers after a painful few years of disconnection. My first visit was in August 2016, in the depths of the Chilean winter. I’d spent the night in a tiny bivouac tent close to the snout of Steffen Glacier, which protrudes like a long, thin nose out of the bottom of the northernmost of Patagonia’s two giant ice fields, dozing fitfully, my mind alert to the percussive beating of the rain.

At dawn, the drumming abated. I peered outside, thinking that the heavens had at last closed their sluice gates, but instead soft flakes of snow were falling silently to the rain-soaked ground. I did not relish getting up. My boots were sodden, and had been for several days, while most of my clothes exhibited varying degrees of dampness. I reluctantly unzipped the door of my tent, to let the outside in and the inside out, and was greeted by a spectacle that made me feel like I’d woken to another world. The snow had failed to settle around our camp, the ground was too warm to enshrine its frozen flakes. A thick blanket of cloud sat heavy upon the tree-clad slopes, but always moving, shape-shifting, its wispy edges playing among the thick forest canopy, like trails of incense in a dimly lit room. I watched, enchanted by this theatre of clouds in motion, their ghostly shapes dancing above an amphitheatre of trees and ice.

Slowly the clouds to the west opened a chink to let through blue light, slowly raising their curtain of rain and snow to reveal great mountains etched in white and black. Across their flanks a clear line was drawn, like a watermark, where snow had turned to rain at low altitudes. Glimpses of smoothly moulded granite bore witness to a much larger ice sheet that had covered Patagonia 20,000 years ago. Yet despite the erosive force of thousands of years of moving ice, the mountain sides were often lumpy, crumpled like used paper bags, capped by gleaming snowdrifts. This apparent contradiction of juxtaposed smooth and roughly hewn rock reflects two important processes by which glaciers sculpt their landscape, which often occur on different sides of a mountain when buried by ice. ‘Abrasion’, a bit like sanding, occurs on the upstream side as the glacier flows over the obstacle and its base melts under pressure, while ‘plucking’ (or quarrying) happens on the downstream side, when meltwater worms its

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