The ice on Platform 1

A general look over the Disko Bay shows us that the vast majority of icebergs are white as snow. Here we have therefore picked up a piece that has been broken by just such a white iceberg. And now get up close and see what the surface of an iceberg would look like if you got really close to it.

One of the things that makes this lump of ice white is the refraction of light partly in the ice itself but also in the many trapped bubbles - and we know from physics that the fact that we see a white surface in reality means that all the sun's rays are reflected and sent off the ice.

This ice, it has been created on the ice sheet by the accumulation of many years of snowfall. It actually piles up so much that the ice in some places is as much as 3.2 km. thick. And it is clear that these huge amounts of snow also weigh quite a lot. The weight causes a great pressure to be created down in the ice – a pressure that causes the snowflake's crystal structure to link with each other and all in all create a hard ice structure – The process where the snow goes from being loose firn to solid ice takes place down in approx. 80 meters deep and it is also here that the air is trapped inside like bubbles in the ice. When examining the ice, it is important to remember this, i.e. that the air is first embedded firmly in the ice at a depth of 80 meters, where the snow itself can already be over 100 years old.

If you want to find out how old the ice is, you have to go to a slightly more sophisticated laboratory than this one. In a laboratory it would be possible to analyze the ice thoroughly and by looking at e.g. the content of acid and other parameters it is possible to determine the age.

Another important analysis that can be done is done by examining  the air content of the ice which gives us a clue about the climate back in the days when this exact piece of ice was formed. You cannot read the temperature of the air directly, but based on an analysis of the oxygen composition of the air, you can determine the temperature in the cloud where the snowflakes were formed.

We would generally consider the white ice here to be from the time after the last ice age - and it will thus have an age of up to 12,000 years.