I have decided to book a guided tour to the Perito Moreno Glacier, and by 9 am was waiting for my tour mini-bus, eager to check another glacier in my bucket list. To begin with, El Calafate is a nice looking town, perfectly adapted to receive tourists. With 30,000 permanent residents, it has become the place of entry to the Parque Naacional de los Glaciares. A calafate is a short spiny bush, with a rounded profile to best withstand the incessant winds that blow from the Pacific, over Chile, and then sweep down across Patagonia. It has a small purple berry (like a small blueberry) that is very popular for jams and candies.
The town is at the downstream end of Lago Argentino, which was named as such by Francisco Perito Moreno himself, when he observed the light blue waters of the lake, the snow-clad mountains behind it, and the cloudless blue sky above: Light blue-white-light blue suggested to Moreno the Argentinian flag and hence the name of the lake. From the air the lake has the shape of a giant squid, moving to the east across Patagonia. The "tentacles" on the upstream end are fed by creeks and several glaciers, and eventually join to form the bulk of the lake, which is the third largest in South America (after Titicaca and Lago Buenos Aires). But going back to the "tentacles", one of them forms a loop, partially blocked by the Perito Moreno Glacier. Imagine the letter ć, where the c is the loop and the accent is the glacier. Upstream of the glacier the lake is called Brazo Rico and downstream from the glacier it is called Canal de los Témpanos. I will come back to this bit of geography after I tell you more about the ice field where the glacier(s) originate.
You all know, of course, that the big ice sheets of our time are Antarctica and Greenland, but you may not know that the third largest ice field is the Southern Andean ice field, which is 370 km long, 35 km wide (an area of about 12,500 km2), and feeds more than 150 glaciers. The ice field is enriched every winter by the abundant snow that falls after the moist Pacific air rises over the Andes. This same air drops and heats up down into Patagonia, where it scavenges moisture to form the Patagonian desert. Many of the glaciers have retreated over the last 100 years, but the Perito Moreno Glacier has actually extended and retreated several times over the same time period. For example, when it was first visited (not by Moreno) the glacier was nearly a kilometer back from its current front, then it lurched in the first half of the 20th century, then retreated in the second half, and then lurched forward again between 2004 and 2020. When the glacier advances it cuts the "tentacle" lake in two, so the upstream lake has no outlet and its stage rises against the ice dam, by a good 10 meters; the pressure of the water eventually breaches the ice barrier and a spectacular break takes place. One that was caught in video was the 2004 breach. You can watch it in YouTube is you search for:
Rompimiento glaciar Perito Moreno 2004
I was enjoying the panoramic view of the glacier, which is about 5 km wide and 30 km long, when an Andean condor went gliding parallel to the white/blue face of the glacier. What a magnificent flyer!
I acquired a lot of this lore by sitting on the rock mass against which the glacier abuts when it closes the gap, watching in awe as big slabs of blue ice spalled off the front of the glacier. First one hears the roar of the ice breaking and then, with any luck, you see an ice avalanche extending all the way to the water. Things are too fast to whip up the cell phone and take a picture, but I tried and tried. It is easy to become obsessed. In some instances some of the floating icebergs loose a big piece (probably the size of a house) and become unbalanced, so the whole remaining thing flips over, and the blue ice in the bottom breaches to the surface, as if a giant blue whale had just surfaced for air. Ultimately persistence had its reward, and I caught in video the calving of a big prism of ice, 20 or 30 meters tall. It created a big splash and a beautiful mini-tsunami!
The day had been sunny and crisp, and I could have stayed there for hours, but after my moment of glory a freezing drizzle started falling with increasing intensity. I was not ready for rain (or for extreme cold), so reluctantly I climbed up from my viewing perch and joined many other wet tourists under the very limited canopy provided by the park for precisely this eventuality. Damp but happy I declared the day a rousing success!
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