Teresa, Lauren, Frederic and I decided to go together to El Calafate, the gateway to visiting the "Parque Nacional de los Glaciares". Darryll went up to Buenos Aires to start his trip in Brazil and Geri decided to stay for a few more days in Ushuaia.
The first surprise when landing at El Calafate was how dry everything was (even dryer than Península Valdés!). Eventhought the town is next to one of the largest lakes in Argentina (Lago Argentino), it's completely surrounded by desert. I had imagined that by being closer to the Andes and having a lot of water nearby this would be a quite green region, so the landscape I saw had nothing to do with what I expected.
The second (and not very positive) surprise, was that the Perito Moreno glacier had finally broken the day before, after an initial breaking 2 days before, so we missed it for just one day! This glacier used to be one of the few in the world that was still advancing, but it is considered to be static at this moment. It still advances around 1.7 m every day (quite impressive), but the pieces that fall down neutralize that advancement.
The Perito Moreno glacier is located opposite to one peninsula at Lago Argentino, and when it advances and reaches the peninsula, it shuts down one of the arms of this lake (like a natural dam) making the water level on that side to rise which, eventually, makes the glacier break. And that's what happened last March. Initially the glacier would break down every 4 or so years, but this last time the whole process has taken 16 years, confirming that the advancement of the glacier is, at best, slowing down.
Eventhough we missed the incredible spectacle of the breaking (which may never happen again), seeing this 60 m high and 30 km long glacier is still amazing. Unfortunately, we didn't see many large pieces of ice falling (something that occurs many times every day), but the ones we saw were spectacular, making an incredible sound and producing waves in the lake.
But even more impressive for me than Perito Moreno was the trip to see the Upsala glacier, the largest continental glacier in the Southern hemisphere. The glacier is huge, around 80 m high, and it floats over the lake (meaning that the lake is over 800 m at that point) and it covers a surface about 3 times the size of the city of Buenos Aires. While getting there by boat you have to go around huge blue-colored icebergs that have fallen from it and are pushed away from it by the wind (extremely strong, I can asure you). The color and shape of these icebergs are incredible, and some of them are as high as a 6-story building (only the visible part).
Laguna Onelli was also a highlight of this trip. Three small glaciers end at this beautiful lagoon, filling it with lots os smaller icebergs that produce an amazing landscape.
The water from the glaciers is called "glacial milk", and it has a distinctive and beautiful greenish/blue color due to the sediments and minerals suspended on it. Most lakes and rivers on this region, both in Chile and Argentine, originate from glaciars and that's why the all have this unique color.
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