Day 9 Glacier Bay

Day 9

AT SEA: GLACIER BAY

It was about lunchtime when we found ourselves sailing through the fjord known as Glacier Bay. Once a large single glacier until the early C18th kown as the Grand Pacific Glacier and 4,000ft thick and 20 miles wide. Since then it has retreated 70 miles to the head of the bay at Tarr Inlet leaving some 20 tributary glaciers reaching down towards the bay.

The sides of the fjord were steep and rocky. To the left as we sailed was the Fairweather Range from which many of the glaciers originated. Covered in low cloud was Mount Cooper 6,780ft.

  
The Margerie Glacier lies close to the head of the fjord. Once it was a tributary of the Grand Pacific Glacier. It is about a mile wide and extends back 20 miles to the Canadian border. It is named after the French geographer Emmanuel de Margerie who visited Glacier Bay in 1913.

A close up of the snout reveals the thin layers of morainic debris embedded in the ice.

At the side lateral moraine is clearly visible.

We had hoped to see calving but once again the ice was not obliging.

 After standing on deck while the ship slowly turned round to give everybody the best view, we started to return down the fjord pausing to investigate Johns Hopkins Inlet.

Johns Hopkins Glacier rises from the Fairweather Range. It was named in 1893 after the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, which sponsored an expedition here. The ice is a mile wide and 250ft thick. It is advancing and calving is sufficiently vigorous for a two miles exclusion zone to be placed around the snout.

Leaving the inlet we rounded Jaw Point .........

...... to find yet another glacier - Lamplugh Glacier.

There was a  large ice cave in the snout probably carved by a melt water stream running through the base of the ice. This 8 mile long glacier was named in 1912 after the English geologist George Lamplugh who came to Glacier Bay in 1884.