Svalbard Diary, Day 10: A good glacier is like a cathedral...

Heading south now, we'd left the bright lights of Longyearbyen behind us, and were heading back to Hornsund for a scheduled glacier cruise in our trusty zodiacs. Our driver for the morning was Pierre, a South African marine oceanographer, and a really fascinating character.

A glacier in Hornsund. It's a lot bigger
than it looks...

We set off in glorious sunshine and made our way through the brash ice - that's the small bits of ice - to near the foot of the glacier. The safety rule is that you keep at least three times the height of the glacier away from its base, and Pierre wasn't going to break that rule. It was simply stunning, as the light sparkled on the surface of the water, but it wasn't quiet.

You see, if you have ice floating in water, it does what your ice cubes do when you pour gin on them, it makes cracking noises. This is, we were told, caused by the air in the ice expanding, if my understanding of the explanation was correct. And, even more amazingly, that air is the air trapped in the ice when it became formed in the glacier. It could be hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old. Cool, eh?

Pierre suggested that we take a moment of private silence, almost immediately broken by one of our fellow passengers who clearly wasn't paying attention. There's always one, isn't there... But it was truly magical, and even amongst all of the amazing things we'd seen, and were yet to see, it will be something that stays with me forever.

The afternoon was taken up with a cruise around Brepollen, a fairly recently formed body of water formed after the retreat of a number of glaciers. It was pretty, and for geologists, an interesting landscape, but our reverie was disturbed by an announcement. There were beluga whales off of the starboard bow.

Beluga whales are pretty skittish, apparently, but in a fantastic piece of sailing, our Finnish captain managed to bring us parallel to the pod as it made its way along the shore in fairly shallow water, without disturbing them. There were even calves, which you could make out by their greyish colouring. We were so close that you didn't need binoculars, and the nature photographers amongst us, and there were many, got some fantastic shots.

The show went on and on, and our captain was able to keep us abreast of them for some time until, eventually, we had to take our leave, for we had many miles to travel before our next scheduled stop...