White Thunder

One last photograph from my Alaska archives this evening, just so something with a bit more color and flair can be seen under the 'Recent Deviations' portion of my page: the "oh so obligatory if you're going to be shooting photographs in southeastern Alaska" image of a glacier calving.

This is a photograph of one of my favorite things/places to be on this planet - the Hubbard Glacier. It's the longest tidewater glacier in North America, over seventy miles long, and this is a photograph taken at its face, where it meets Yakutat Bay near the Gulf of Alaska. The splash in the photograph is a calving event - ice falling from the front of the glacier into the water, the birth of ice bergs. Don't let the photograph fool you - I would estimate that the ice is falling from a height of nearly one hundred feet and that the resulting splash is somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty feet high. (I took this from a boat, heavy on the zoom... it would be dangerous indeed to be too close.)

The title of the photograph, White Thunder, is a turn of phrase borrowed from the Tlingit Indians, the people who live near this glacier. They use it to refer to the sound created by the calving of the ice, and it's difficult to imagine unless you've stood near it, watched it happen, felt the sound travel straight through you - but it sounds exactly like the thunder of a storm. It's the perfect description of a glacier meeting water, of a river of ice pouring itself forcefully into the sea.