East Greenland
Glaciers and Icebergs of East Greenland
August 2015
The Greenland Ice Sheet covers about 80 percent of Greenland and exceeds 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) in thickness at its thickest point. Along the mountainous coast, glaciers flow downslope under gravity. Differences in the speed and direction of that movement create fractures, crevasses, ridges, and jagged towers of ice.
Where a glacier terminates in a fjord or the sea, sections of ice may break away through a process called calving. The detached ice becomes an iceberg. Because freshwater ice is less dense than seawater, approximately 90 percent of a typical iceberg remains below the waterline.
Dense glacier ice can appear blue because ice absorbs more red wavelengths of visible light while transmitting and scattering blue wavelengths. Older, highly compressed ice generally contains fewer air bubbles, allowing light to travel farther through it and intensifying the blue appearance. Snow, cracks, and air bubbles scatter a broader range of light and make other sections appear white.
These photographs, created in 2015, document glacier fronts, fractured ice, and calved icebergs along the coast of East Greenland. Their forms are temporary, continually altered by ice movement, calving, melting, water, and weather.
