Kind: captions
Language: en
think you know what a glacier is well
think again I'd like you to meet helheim
a glacier in southeast Greenland first
of all it's not completely white and
it's not completely flat the surface is
usually a mixture of whites and Grays
iridescent blues and also some darker
colors that are the accumulation of dust
on the surface helheim is like a giant
River of ice originating like a lot of
glaciers up here as snow that falls upon
the Greenland ice sheet over thousands
of years it starts to flow downhill and
as it approaches the coast it starts to
get funneled into these steep walled
valleys and there the flow starts to
accelerate turns out that sometimes a
glacial pace is really fast helheim is
moving 3 ft per hour because the glacier
is moving so fast it cracks apart and so
you have Pinnacles of ice and these
great yawning crevasses you could drive
easily several School buses into them
and it would still be plenty of space to
leave an open void in the summertime
meltwater Cascades along helheim edges
and if you kneel down you find these
turquoise pools filled with cryonite a
fancy name for dirt helheim is a
landscape unto
itself now if you move in the direction
that helheim is Flowing you eventually
get to the Terminus where the glacier
meets the ocean you can think of it as a
vertical face of ice we can only see the
part that above the waterline for
helheim that part's almost 25 stories
tall it plunges another half mile into
the ocean below and icebergs are
constantly calving off that Terminus
into the ocean but there's such a volume
of ice coming off helheim Glacier that
those icebergs can't escape the fiord
fast enough so they all kind of jumble
together and it becomes this semi- rigid
Matrix of icy blocks that we call a
mange 10 to 15 mil farther down the
Fjord we leave the malange behind and
the icebergs drift more freely this F
connects helheim and the North Atlantic
along the way the icebergs melt and all
the while water in the form of snow has
been falling upon the Greenland ice
sheet replenishing helheim and other
glaciers like it it's just an amazing
immense amount of masses being moved by
these systems helheim is just one of
thousands of glaciers in Greenland and
they're all different just like giant
snowflakes
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