Whisky on the rocks

If I hadn’t walked on Perito Moreno with my own two feet I’d have suspected someone constructed it out of polystyrene as some kind of elaborate (not to mention odd) hoax. How can a glacier be so massive (30km long, 5km wide), so tall (up to 90m out of the water), so deep (up to 200m under the water), so astonishingly blue?

The turquoise of the ice is a trick of the light created by compression – the less airy and more compacted the ice, the more blue light is reflected and the deeper the colour becomes.

And yet it’s not how it looks that’s most surprising, it’s how it sounds. This glacier advances up to 2 metres every single day. Imagine the size of the ice blocks calving off each hour and the crack, rumble and splash as they break off, tumble and fall into the freezing iceberg-strewn waters of Lago Argentino.

Walking on the glacier is harder than it looks. In crampons it’s hard to walk like you’re not wearing stilts (feet apart, no bending the foot) and the surface is extremely ridged and cracked. Still, our reward is worth it: a celebratory glass of whisky on the glacial rocks, ice fresh from Perito Moreno. And it didn’t taste anything like polystyrene, so perhaps it is real after all.

It really is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.