The power of ice

Travelling north from Queenstown we came across the ninety foot falls, the water appears to flow from solid rock and falls completely free to the river below. The Haast river runs through a valley originally cut by a glacier that has since retreated up the mountains, leaving huge rocks and other debris strewn around the valley floor.

Our target for today was another glacier, the Fox. Glacier, whose ice sheets grew and receded in a series of ice ages over the last two million years, and at it’s last peak 20,000 years ago ice covered the whole region to a depth of hundreds of metres.

Over the past two centuries the ice has continued to recede, it is not some two kilometers further up the valley than it was then. We took the car as far as we could, then walked about a mile up a steep hill of rocks and fine dust alongside a river of glacial melt, almost white in colour with the fine dust ground from the rock by the glacier, and carrying huge chunks of ice down with it.

As we reached the face of the ice it appeared black with the dust and debris, with chunks of ice sticking out of the face. These move at a rate of around 5cms (2inches) a day, and some of the ice now reaching the face was laid down hundreds of years ago. Topped up each winter, at places the ice can by a couple of hundred metres thick.At any time blocks of ice of many tons can break off, in fact we heard some go as we were there, so we were glad that we were some distance above the face in safety.

Moving on we passed close to the Franz Josef glacier, another of the eight ice sheets still in the region. We could see right up the glacier for quite a few miles, huge crevasses were showing on the top of the ice many metres deep.

It is difficult to imagine the power of this natural phenomena, rock faces laid bare and sheer, huge slabs of rock dumped and massive moraines formed as the glacier recedes.There is a great deal of power in this ice.