Elephant Foot Glacier

 

There's a lot of debate on social media about whether this photo is real -- surely it is too perfect to be true? When I first encountered it, there was no location, but I have tracked it down to Romer Lake, in the far north of Greenland. The piedmont glacier itself is called Elephant Foot Glacier -- and you can see why. It's the perfect illustration of a solid flowing like a liquid.......  it's located on the shore of a lake which is frozen solid for most of the year -- and this may explain why erosional processes and calving have not greatly affected the glacier snout.

Anyway, the above photo has clearly been doctored, because everything is too smooth for comfort -- but the main distortion occurs because the image width has been compressed, giving the distant mountain slopes an exaggerated steepness. So the piedmont glacier is really a bit wider than it appears.

Images from Google Earth