Description

Dawes Glacier, Endicott Arm Fjord, horizontal shot.   In this wide-angle horizontal composition, snow-garbed mountains preside dramatically in the background, their peaks wreathed by clouds, while below their scoured ramparts a great river of ice flows, following a serpentine path to the green waters of the fjord below.  The ice is blue where densest and absorbing the most red light, and grayed where the glacier has scraped up rock, forming great striations that trace the glacier’s journeys.  Framing the wall of ice at both the left and right, nearby barren rocky slopes guide the ice-river’s path.  Glaciers are great sheets of moving ice, hundreds of feet thick or more.  Dawes Glacier is approximately three hundred feed high at its face, with another three hundred feet below the waterline.  Dawes Glacier is located at the end of the glacier-carved fjord Endicott Arm, off of the Stephens Passage seaway, in southern Alaska.  Glaciers carve out valleys and sculpt mountains, grinding solid rock into sediment, which forms stripes in the glacier when two glaciers run together.  The deep blue ice is from the bottom of the glacier and is very dense and hard, owing its color to the absorption of the redder light waves.  This deep blue ice is thought to be ten thousand years old.  Icebergs calve off of the face of the glacier, floating out into the seaway.  Cruise ships often travel up the fjords of Endicott arm and Tracy Arm to visit Dawes Glacier and Sawyer Glacier, coming to within about a quarter of a mile of the face of the glacier in the deep waters of the fjord.  See my many other photos of Dawes Glacier, Endicott Arm Fjord, and Alaska.  Stock photo.