MORE ABOUT OUTDOOR ADVENTURES

Despite glaciers making up a large part of our planet, many people don’t realize how gigantic they truly are. Glaciers are huge bodies of ice and snow that move on their own. Some of them are so massive you can see them from space!

• To be considered a real glacier, it must be at least twenty-five square acres. That’s the size of nearly nineteen football fields!
• Some glaciers look blue because that’s the only color glacial ice can’t absorb. The dense ice of the glacier absorbs every other color—so blue is what we see!
• Right now, the largest glacier on Earth is Lambert Glacier in Antarctica. It’s sixty miles wide and approximately 270 miles long.
• There are around 100,000 glaciers in Alaska alone.

Glacier hiking trips are a great way to explore these massive ice fields. People can glacier hike no matter how old they are. Ice climbing, kayaking, and exploring ice caves and lagoons can also be done on glaciers.

Ice climbing is when people climb on ice formations like glacier walls and frozen waterfalls. Ice-climbing competitions started in Russia and have been held there every winter since 1970. In March of 2019, two ice climbers made it to the top of Canada’s highest waterfall, Della Falls, which is 1,443 feet high!

Kayaking is a fun activity that people can do in warm or cold waters. When kayaks were first invented, they were made of seal or other animal skin stretched over wood or whale bone. Kayaks are very quiet, which made them perfect for hunting and sneaking up on prey. Now, they are perfect for gliding quietly through the water and spotting wildlife.