#43 Follow Me to Grey Glacier (1) 🇨🇱 格雷冰川初探（一）

I took these photos during a trip to Grey Glacier in southern Chile. Located in the Torres del Paine National Park, Grey Glacier flows southward into a lake called Lago Grey. This glacier is part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. Together with the Northern Patagonian Ice Field, the ice cap is the world's 3rd largest mass of ice after Antarctica and Greenland. Since I haven't yet got time and budget to either of the two poles, it's pretty awesome as well to explore this more accessible glacier at first. So let's get started to have a glance at this more approachable beauty! =)

我住在智利的时候，有幸去南部的格雷冰川一探究竟，拍下了帖子里的这些照片。格雷冰川位于百内国家公园内，向南流向格雷湖。格雷冰川是南巴塔哥尼亚冰原的一部分，而南北冰原则构成了继南极大陆和格陵兰岛之后的世界第三大面积的冰盖。在有闲有钱去到那两块神秘高冷的大陆烧银子之前，先让我带着各位瞅瞅格雷冰川这位比较平易近人的邻家冰美人吧。;)

If you follow the famous big circuit of Paine Mountain Range at John Garner Pass, you will see the glacier and the lake surface. Since we had limited time and didn't feel very hardcore anymore after a long trip in southern Chile, we just walked to Lago Grey to take a boat to see this natural wonder. Even walking to Lago Grey was not so easy as imagined - I will describe it with photos in my next post. =)

When I was there in 2016, the glacier was 6km wide and more than 30m high. And according to the officials at Torres del Paine National Park, a large iceberg broke off the Grey glacier in November of 2017:

If you are an annoying curious kid like me when I was little(doesn't change much today), you may wonder why the ice here looks blue? (Clearing throat... ready for the science lesson? I learnt the following in Chinese when I was in school, so it's interesting for me to write it down now in English ;p) Because the red (long wavelengths) part of white light is absorbed by ice, and the blue (short wavelengths) light is transmitted and scattered. Snow is compressed when falling on a glacier, and over years of pressure, the compressed snow develops into part of the glacier. During the process, the air caught in the ice is squeezed out, leaving little reflective surface for the sunlight. Without the scattering effect of air bubbles, light can penetrate ice undisturbed.

So, here I captured all these photos of the "blue" ice to the naked eye. Following the changes of the sunlight and clouds, the glacier and icebergs appeared in different hues - light blue, blue-green, deep blue, blue with a warm glow... all look so brilliant.

如果你跟我一样是个惹人烦的对什么都充满好奇的人，你可能会问为什么这些冰川冰山看上去都是蓝色的呢？嘿嘿，根据《十万个为什么》，这是因为......请先看上面的英文吧，有空我会翻译的。;)