Arctic Rivers
Rivers of ice and water. Glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets and icebergs. Everything is in motion. As the ice on land melts and drains they feed fast flowing rivers that fluctuate and flood with the time of day. Standing at the base of a 50-foot-tall moraine, we are separated from the stone filled debris pile by an opaque river full of ground up glacial flour, listening to the boulders tumble past us with no safe passage across. At the toe of the glacier, the outflow spreads out onto sheets of ice. They betray the solar heat causing the torrent of water to block our way, while the river filled with abrasives cuts a sharp incision into the earth. We tentatively step into the river, feeling our way with our toes, the ice cold water instantly numbing our legs. A pot hole. A boulder rolls under our feet. Its confirmed. No safe passage.

It’s even harder to realize but the entire field of ice we are looking at, is actually flowing, applying millions of pounds of its weight to the underlying surface, unrelenting in its advance. The glacier is cutting and carving wide U shaped valleys, eventually leaving behind smooth surfaces marked by striations caused by rocks caught in the underbelly of the ice behemoth, pulling along, scratching and gouging the subsurface.
Glaciers have been nicknamed buzz saws, conveyor belts that cut, crush and re-contour the earth. Breaking up and accumulating the rock and soil, they drag, push and compress them into “mounds of earth” or moraines. The relentless movement of the glaciers pluck and grind the surrounding landscape carrying it effortlessly along. Where two glaciers meet the debris causing beautiful long lines (medial moraine) to mark their intersection. Other times the glacier grinds and gathers rock from the surrounding mountains. Dragging and depositing this collection laterally along its sides, (hence the term, lateral moraine) it forms boundaries marking its passage. Playing the role of a giant bulldozer and conveyer built into one, the glacier pushes everything in its path forward and transports its collection of stones into a pile marking the terminus of its advance (Terminal Moraine).
Even the tundra around us is flowing. The tundra soil is slowly built up over tens and hundreds of years, supporting the sparse arctic vegetation during the short summer growing season. But it is only the surface that thaws. The tundra acts to insulate the permafrost below, which in turn provides a slippery base. The soil loosely bound by the roots of the arctic grasses succumbs to gravity and the water laden soil flows along the top of the permafrost. Solifluction, or the movement of the earth on top of permafrost, forms ripples, edge currents, even “soil” falls mimicking a slow motion river.
And then there are the cliffs. Steep sides of rock shattered by the extreme cold and expanding to spall sheets of rock forming talus cones, piles of cracked angular boulders. Where the water becomes trapped and frozen between the stones, these too move down, as rock glaciers.


The action does not stop there on land. Taking to water we float in Fjords in kayaks, continuing to observe and explore. Fjords are described as deep narrow inlets. At this point, deep is ½ mile of cliffs above us and 1 mile of water underneath. Wide at this point is 1 ½ miles across and almost 14 miles in eclipse sound to the east of us. Ancient ice once covered all of this and flowed over the very waters we paddled on. We are surrounded by the evidence of times of colder climates when the advance of glaciers extended out into the sea.
Gravity, the force associated with the Earth’s mass, does not originate at the Earth’s surface nor does it stop at sea level. It comes deeper from the very center of the planet. Gravity keeps pulling the glacier down following the contours of the ocean bottom. In the past, with more water trapped in the paleo-ice sheets, the ocean levels were as much as 300 feet lower. Glaciers could travel further out across the land before reaching the water.
Sitting in a kayak looking up at near vertical cliffs towering 2700 feet above, you realize that the glaciers were massive. Glacier ice is frozen (solid) water and weighs about 1 gram per cubic centimeter or about 62 pounds per cubic foot . A square foot column of ice that tall would weigh 167,794 pounds! Depending whether the surrounding water is salt or fresh – only about 1/8th of the ice will be above the water. Which means a 100 foot wall of ice needs 700 feet of water to “float”. This combined with its enormous mass means the glacier, while “less dense” in water, is still grinding and pulverizing what lays below. The ice is compacted under its own weight and it has even more density or mass. The compression causes it to flow. Rivers of ice.
We floated. We looked around. A light breeze pushing us so ever gently. A few strokes to the edge. Stop. Look closely at the edges. Swirls of black rock embedded in the granite. You realize that the rock known as gneiss, shows it too has been deformed, which means it’s buried at such a depth where the overlying rock is compressed to a point where it became “plastic” and flowed. Rivers of rock.
We are in the Arctic – during its brief respite from the cold blowing snow and ice. Everything is exposed for those few months. The relative warmth of the day, does not change the past nor the present day winters that cover this land, freezing and shattering the rock, and ever so slowly changing the landscape to what we see today.