N 64.02560°, W 16.93667°
Ta-daaaaa! As per the coordinates, an early start and a 5K there-and-back trudge finally saw Emma on the Skaftafellsjökull glacier.
They are even more intimidating up close than from a distance. Indeed they feel like they're alive. As we got to within about 500 metres of this one the air temperature dropped by what must have been 10°C, no wonder that you often seen a fug of otherwise incongruous mist over them. It's not the first time we've noticed odd micro-climate phenomena around them, the one we nearly reached a couple of days ago was blowing a strong, cold wind straight in our faces; a few hundred metres away it was a warm day and there wasn't even the slightest breeze: these things make their own weather.
Once right up to Skaftafellsjökull it stamped its authority; the whole thing is constantly cracking, dripping melt-water, and releasing mineral material right up to the size of rocks that it captured who knows how long ago. Standing still for a couple of minutes, we heard all manner of activity, especially from within the crevasses. We only ventured a few metres onto it but it was enough to give a sense of just how unpredictable and dangerous these things are. Awesome, yet uncomfortably disturbing.
The pic shows the mind-boggling scale. If you look really closely you can make out two people almost at the foot of the glacier, they are just to the left of the end of the lighter coloured track that runs from the mid-foreground left of shot towards the glacier at roughly the centre of shot. The people are miniscule beneath the glacier's face.
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