land ice vs. sea ice
Ice before this trip was a few chunks in a drinking glass or maybe an unfortunate thing to happen to sidewalks and roads when instead I could be playing in snow. Ice for me now is not alive, but follows predictable cycles of change and transformation and is so huge and intertwined with life that I’ve moved it into the same landscape feature category as mountains or deserts. It isn’t just a little part of everyday life, it’s a thing that exists vastly in the world and I’m privileged enough to experience it for a little while.
The biggest thing I know about ice after being in it for 2 weeks is that land ice and sea ice are totally different: how things form, how they evolve, and what role they play in the environment- all totally different.
- Land ice: snow -> firn (densely packed snow, but “not ice”!) -> ice sheet/cap, depending on size -> glacier (an ice sheet that got real big and now “flows” downhill). If an ice sheet or a glacier is coastal, it can extend/flow out into the water. It doesn’t break apart right away, and the unbroken part of sheet/glacier suspended over the water’s surface is called an ice shelf.
- Icebergs are broken pieces of glaciers that are now in the ocean- they're formed from land ice and not from sea ice. They’re named both for size and shape, and my favorite size class is officially called a “bergy bit” according to the International Ice Patrol (which formed after the Titanic sank).
- Sea ice (which got all the interesting names compared to land ice): frazil (tiny floating ice spikes) -> grease ice (a film of frazil ice at the surface) -> shuga (pronounced like “sugar” without the “r”) or slush -> ice rind or “nilas” (crusty ice) -> bigger ice pieces named by size, my favorite of which is called “pancake ice”.
Land ice is generally chunky (90% of glaciers are underwater based on how ice floats in seawater). Sea ice is generally flat-ish. It all smashes and sticks together sometimes and breaks apart other times. It is all AMAZINGLY, INSPIRINGLY BEAUTIFUL in a way that has changed my soul.
🧊 Virginia
This iceberg was huge- multiple football fields in size. Nobody told me how much detail there would be on the glacier faces- I'm used to seeing posters of smooth, diamond-shaped, cartoon pieces of ice. I love the icicles and caves and some have big colored scars where it looks like they've been ground down by sandpaper in a giant's workshop. And white to blue is a whole color spectrum down here.
This is some kind of crusty sea ice, maybe nilas? It's harder to tell them all apart than you might think! And there are all these other names for ice features, like the 5 shards to the left of center in this photo are called "fingers". The places where the ice looks white are from ice stacking up as it gets pushed together. And notice how different the color is on this photo- it's not a mistake or a filter, I took this one during a multi-hour sunrise where all the ice was a little pink.