A day in the life of a glacier is pretty slow. Today, you might be a metre or so ahead of where you were a month ago. Life is even slower in the Kaskawulsh Glacier, in northwest Canada’s Yukon.
It’s so large – the glaciers, plural, cover more than 25,000 square kilometres – that it takes up to 7,000 years for the ice to travel the 70 kilometres through the St Elias Mountains to the rivers at its end. For scale, this junction where the arms meet is almost six kilometres wide.