60 pieces · NaturePhoto by Hans-Jürgen Weinhardt on Unsplash (Unsplash License). The calving face of the Perito Moreno Glacier in Los Glaciares National Park, Santa Cruz Province, Argentina — a wall of fractured blue ice stretching across an arm of Lago Argentino, with the visitor walkways on the Península de Magallanes along the near shore and beech-covered slopes rising to snow-streaked peaks behind.
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The Face of the Perito Moreno Glacier
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The Face of the Perito Moreno Glacier
This is the snout of the Perito Moreno Glacier in Los Glaciares National Park, in Santa Cruz Province at the southern end of Argentine Patagonia. The ice comes down off the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, one of the largest bodies of ice outside the polar regions, and ends abruptly where it runs into an arm of Lago Argentino. The front is a few kilometres wide and stands tens of metres above the waterline, with far more of it hidden below — what you are looking at is the broken end of a river of ice that has been sliding downhill for centuries, cracking apart as it goes. The thin orange line in the foreground is the viewing walkway on the Península de Magallanes, which sits directly opposite the face across a narrow channel; the handful of people on it give the only honest sense of scale in the picture.
The colour is a property of the ice itself rather than of the light. Snow that falls high on the ice field is buried, compressed and squeezed free of its air bubbles over many years, and the dense, bubble-free ice that results absorbs red wavelengths and scatters blue ones back out. Fresh fractures expose that deep ice, which is why the newest cracks and the base of the wall glow strongest while the sun-weathered top is nearly white. Perito Moreno is also known for a rhythm that few glaciers still have: it periodically pushes right across the channel, dams the southern arm of the lake, and holds back the rising water until the ice bridge undercuts, arches and collapses in a rupture that draws crowds to this walkway. It is one of the reasons the glacier has stayed a destination rather than a statistic — for decades it held its position while most of the world's large glaciers were retreating.
As a jigsaw it splits cleanly into three jobs. The mountains are the easy opening: sharp ridgelines, snow patches and the hard boundary between bare rock and dark southern beech forest give you unambiguous edges to lock together. The ice wall is the long middle stretch — it looks uniform at a glance, but it is really a field of vertical fissures and seracs, so work by the direction a crack leans and by the slight shifts from white through turquoise into shadowed navy rather than hunting for shapes. Save the cloud for last. The sky is the softest region in the frame, a dull grey-mauve with very little structure, and the trick is to sort those pieces by brightness and build the gradient down toward the ridgeline instead of trying to match them one at a time.
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- Tap Play The Face of the Perito Moreno Glacier puzzle to open the puzzle board, then choose your piece count and difficulty.
- Drag pieces from the tray onto the board and snap them into place until the full image is complete. Works with mouse on desktop and touch on mobile.
- Use the Preview button on the play screen to peek at the full reference image whenever you need a hint.
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Frequently asked questions
- Where is the Perito Moreno Glacier?
- In Los Glaciares National Park, in Santa Cruz Province in southern Argentina, about eighty kilometres west of the town of El Calafate. The park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The glacier flows east off the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, which straddles the Argentina–Chile border, and ends in the Canal de los Témpanos, an arm of Lago Argentino. A road runs out to the Península de Magallanes opposite the face, and the steel walkways in the foreground of this photograph let visitors stand within a few hundred metres of the ice.
- Why is the ice blue?
- Because of how glacier ice forms. Snow accumulating on the ice field is buried by later snowfall and slowly compacted, and over years the trapped air is squeezed out until what remains is dense, almost bubble-free ice. Ordinary snow is full of air pockets that scatter every wavelength equally, which is what makes it white. Bubble-free glacier ice absorbs light at the red end of the spectrum and lets blue through and back out, so the deeper and denser the ice, the stronger the blue. Fresh calving scars and crevasses expose that old compressed ice, which is why the cracks read bluest.
- What is the rupture the glacier is famous for?
- Every few years the glacier advances far enough to touch the peninsula opposite and seal off the southern arm of Lago Argentino. With its outlet blocked, the water in that arm rises well above the level of the main lake. The pressure forces a tunnel through the base of the ice dam, the tunnel widens into an arch, and eventually the arch collapses in a sudden, very public rupture. The cycle is irregular rather than scheduled, and it is the main reason this particular walkway was built where it was.
- Does the glacier calve while people are watching?
- Yes, and often. The ice is in constant motion downhill, and because the front terminates in deep lake water the leading edge is undercut and unstable. Blocks split off the wall and fall into the channel regularly through the day, usually announced by a crack like a rifle shot a moment before anything visibly moves. That is also why the walkways are set back on the far shore behind railings — the waves and the floating ice that a large collapse throws across the channel are genuinely dangerous at the waterline.