Melkevollbreen – Kingdom of Ice

Now you are here. In front of you is the Melkevollbreen glacier. It is a branch of Jostedalsbreen, separated from the main ice field up in the mountains and sent down toward the valley floor. The glacier has fascinated visitors since the first tourists of the 19th century came here by horse and carriage and gazed up at the ice with a mixture of awe and relief that they did not have to cross it. The ice here has a distinctive colour – blue-white at its deepest, almost transparent at the edges. The colour occurs because the oldest and deepest layers have had all the air pressed out of them over thousands of years, and light bends differently through bubble-free ice than through ordinary snow. But the glacier is not what it once was. Photographs from the early 1900s show ice reaching all the way down to where the campsite now sits. Today it has retreated far back – hundreds of metres are gone in just a few decades. It advanced during the snowy 1990s and was for a time the only glacier in Europe with a growth rate. But since then it has retreated year by year. What you see now is not a static thing. It is a living process. Look carefully.