@delroth How deep is the ice layer and how does it get replenished? (I wonder if it slides down and if it has holes.)
@robryk about 400m deep there, which is Falljökull (an off shoot of the largest European glacier, Vatnajökull). Apparently shrinking by 8m every year thanks to climate change.
It slides down, fairly quickly in fact, roughly 1m/day. As to how it's replenished, rain and snow melt I guess?
Huh, doesn't it have crevasses then?
@delroth Oh, the other photos seemed as if they were taken while walking over the ice, so I assumed lack of such.
@robryk they were taken while walking over the ice :)
Low altitude glaciers are significantly safer than alpine ones because there's no snow. That means no avalanche risk and you can always see what you're stepping on. So with some crampons and a guide you're good to go even with no prior experience.
@delroth Hm. I need to figure out how crevasses form, because the mechanism I suspected (tearing due to nonuniform motion) would be liable to create thin bridges with potentially indistinctive appearance (the surface would be just slightly lowered). So either the mechanism is different, or the nonuniform flow is constrained in ways I didn't consider.
