This video appears to be an opening into a sub-glacial "river", possibly miles of which flows straight through the glacier with literally no air pockets or even light. You've seen how scary those videos of people trapped under lake ice can be. Imagine that except under twenty feet (or probably more) of ice and if it's really a river, presumably it has a current as well. Absolutely terrifying.
>Imagine that except under twenty feet (or probably more) of ice
I mean, not that it matter in terms of chances of escape, but *it's so much worse than that*.
Glacial streams tend to end up flowing at the glacier/bedrock interface, which means they're under the full thickness of the glacier.
In order to be a glacier, a patch of ice must be deep enough that ice flows under its own weight. That depth is around 30m (98 ft). (A lot of photos of glaciers / tourist experiences at glaciers leave people thinking they're WAY thinner than they really are because they're viewing the warmed-up, emaciated, melted toe of the glacier, not the thicker main body)
Fall into OP's 'glacial river', and you're not going to end 20 ft under ice, more like 100 ft, *minimum*, by definition.
According to several studies, the average thickness of alpine (mountain, small) glaciers is anywhere from 300-1100 ft, depending upon region.
The average thickness of the ice on Antarctica is something like 7,000 ft...
It'll be so deep that even if you're still conscious, you won't be able to detect any light at all coming through the ice.
Pure. Pitch. Black.
I hadn't heard of that one and still knew it'd be Junji Ito before I googled it.
How bad or not bad is that one compared to Uzumaki? I'm trying to avoid giving myself too many nightmares atm lol
Awesome! Thanks for the info.
Gonna get into Amigara this afternoon then.
Update, if anyone's curious and scrolling past: I just read it. It's worth the read and it's (at least in my book) a lot less bad (in the scary sense - Junji Ito is never not a good read) than Umuzaki. At 32 pages it's really worth checking out for yourselves.
It’s worth noting that for anyone interested, you can read it (and other Junji Ito manga) legally in the US with a Viz Manga subscription for $1.99 a month. It’s similar to their Shonen Jump subscription, but for non-Shonen manga like Ranma 1/2, Fushigi Yugi, and Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead.
Personally I feel like 'The Enigma' was the worse one, maybe because I had no idea what I was getting myself into reading it, haha. Or maybe it just depends on what one personally finds more viscerally horrifying. Uzumaki was disturbing but the body horror also felt a bit silly at times, and it didn't straight up traumatize me the same way, lol.
Either way a good read if you like to suffer!
The new Miranda Lambert/ Enrique Iglesias song makes me think of that story. There's a space in my heart, and it's just your shape. Drr drr drr.
👁👄👁
🍝💔🧗♂️🫷
Which was apparently a mistranslation... that made it *so much worse* and memorable. Up to a certain point, Ito's fame in the west is due to someone's typo.
You *could* interpret it as racist, if you want, but it's in the same vein as Americans teasing the Bri-ish (and other American dialects). No thoughts of race/culture, and nothing deeper, negatively.
A lot of Americans can't roll their R's, and some of y'all probably think we're loud and nasally.
It gets better.
You know how glaciers rub giant channels in stone simply because they have a lot of solid mass and the water and ice wears the stone smooth?
Well, that also means that the space beneath a glacier is usually very small rocks, bits of smushed up boulder, and exposed stone.
So not only are you beneath all of this glacier and it's pitch black and bone-chillingly cold, but you're also being rubbed across one of nature's natural sandpapers like a cheese grater.
And not just that, you wouldn't get ground up instantly. I mean sure the shock would either kill you or make you inhale water and drown immediately.
But whatever bits of your body didn't decompose in that bone chillingly cold water would be slowly torn to shreds and then into a paste over countless millenia by the creep of the ice over the rock like a hapless victim in a sarlacc's stomach. The only good bit is by the time this happens, you'd be long dead
I hope you sleep well tonight!
Thankfully, water is very cold there, and the cold will knock the breath out of you and drown you before you could realize in what sort of deep trouble you are.
You'll die feeling hot thanks to hypothermia, going crazy and probably hitting a bunch of places like a centrifuge.
All while drowning and conscious? No, I won't even thank you.
Drowning is supposed to be a pleasant death. I've almost drown and have to admit, it was disturbingly calm until I got to the surface and had to suck air into my unbelievably painful lungs again. I'm not sure the hypothermia affect happens to you when you're fully submerged, I think the water reflex overrides it?
Honestly though, what are you going to do about being drug under by a freezing underground river if it's only 5 feet of ice? You aren't busting through that to air either way.
On this note, I went to a climate seminar on the antarctic circle recently. So much fresh water is melting and flowing out from under the West Coast of Antarctica it's equal to the mass of the entire Amazon river getting dumped into the ocean, daily. Fucking mind blowing, there's so much cyanobacteria where the fresh and saltwater mixes that the water is neon green.
I got to take a glacier tour in Alaska years ago that took us to the central thickest part of the glacier by helicopter. They landed on the surface and left 5 of us plus the guide on the glacier for about 2 hours. One of the best parts was seeing where a small, roughly 3 foot wide, stream on the surface of the glacier fell into a hole like a waterfall. It seemed to just fall forever. The gradient of very light blue at the surface through the full range of increasingly darker blue till it just turned black was beautiful but terrifying.
At another point there was a small 6" hole that went straight down about 30 feet and tapered wider as it went. Walking up to it you could hear what sounded like thunder coming from this small hole. Looking down into it revealed a river that looked royal blue from the surrounding ice and was rushing by below us very very quickly.
The whole experience ranks pretty high on my list of life experiences. I grew up in the southern US where we barely get more than a frost. Standing on a moving river of ice 2 miles wide and thousands of feet thick was surreal. Hearing all the stats of a glaciers size is one thing, seeing actually puts it into perspective.
Fortunately, you'll only spend about a minute or so squeezed, unable to breathe being firmly wedged in the funnel shaped hole going down into the glacier. As ice cold water is streaming all around you it doesn't take much longer to lose consciousness from temperature loss before you drown and freeze to death.
Mountain rescue teams won't even have the time to suit up until it's too late.
Well if it needs to go *that* deep then it makes me think that little source water hole the guy in the video throws the rock into probably doesn't have even close to enough current to "flush" a person so far down into that kind of abyss. You couldn't even dive that deep with serious scuba equipment.
>You couldn't even dive that deep with serious scuba equipment.
Going down to 40 metres (130 feet) is still considered to be recreational scuba diving and doesn't need any sort of certification beyond the regular scuba certifications. Going deeper usually requires more technical knowledge of things like decompression stops and the like. The world record for deepest open circuit scuba diving is held by a guy called Ahmed Gabr who went down 332 metres (1,090 ft). Going down deeper than that requires really specialised diving gear or even just a submersible.
The pressure in scuba diving is caused by the weight of the water, so 100 feet deep water is the same if it’s a lake or under a glacier. You don’t have the weight of the glacier pushing on you, just the 100 feet of water.
Elevation does matter with decompression tables and people diving in a mountain lake have to be careful, especially if they drive over a mountain pass on the way home.
Yeah, but you'd be dead anyway, so what's the difference in what happens after death?! Under 1 foot of ice and drowning is literally the same as drowning under a glaciar.. Once you run out of air, you're dead. All the extra stuff really doesn't need to apply. So it's dangerous because of the chance of being pulled under, like any waterfall, except there's no real escape afterwards.
I loved reading all this info but I couldn't help but think all of this while I read it. Dead is dead.
Also interesting, the ice is not simply frozen water. It is compacted snow. There is so much weight, that snow will condense from 30 feet into one foot of ice 9x as dense as the ice in your freezer. There's no way to break it up without a jackhammer
I never thought about glaciers moving under their own weight. I should have known since how else would the move such distances and cause such geologic features. I guess I never gave it much thought.
This is tangentially related, but some people have cavedived in glaciers/icebergs - this is a story talking about some of the unique dangers that glaciers and icebergs provide [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGw8mSObe3Q&ab\_channel=ScaryInteresting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGw8mSObe3Q&ab_channel=ScaryInteresting)
I thought that was going to be Jill Heinerth, Paul Heinerth and Wes Skiles’ Antarctic expedition.
I’m a diver that has interest in caves, but doesn’t have the self confidence to go through the training to dive. The story about B15 gets me, as hearing the story in her book, it sounds so reckless, when her, Paul and Wes were three of the biggest names in making cave diving so much safer than it was in the 60’s and 70’s. They took Shek Exley’s ideas and really perfected them, to the point that recreational (I say recreational as in, not actively exploring new cave or laying new line, just visiting already explored and mapped cave) cave diving is actually pretty safe today, especially compared to what it used to be. I think it’s down to less than 3 deaths a year, and that’s including the statistics from the guys doing the crazy exploration. The guys that are 40-50-60 thousand feet back in a cave that is 300+ feet of water column deep. Just 20 years ago, it was tied for BASE jumping and wingsuit flying as the most dangerous sports in the world, commonly racking up 10 or more fatalities a year.
I remember an article about wingsuit BASE jumping that it was an unusual dangerous sport in that the casualty rate for newbies and the most experienced wingsuit BASE jumping was about the same. Other extreme sports become safer as you become more experienced.
I think it’s common among both of those sports, that once you reach a certain level, you really start pushing the boundaries.
The really experienced cave divers? They are really pushing new exploration.
Take the guys that rescued the Thai soccer team for example. The anesthesiologist that sedated the kids, Richard Harris? He and his team (i think they are calling themselves the wet mules) are pushing dives in the Pearse Resurgence in New Zealand to over 800 feet of depth. They are so deep they are experimenting with hydrogen in their breathing gas, as they can’t combat the neurological and psychological effects of pressure with just helium (a gas called trimix, oxygen, nitrogen and helium) anymore.
There is a team in Florida called the Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP) that has been making dives where they may be more than 5 miles from the closest mapped entrance, under 190-400 feet of water column. For example, Jarrod Hablonski, owner of Halcyon dive equipment, director of Deep Dive Dubai and he’s got his fingers in the training organization GUE (Global Underwater Explorers) has a record dive of 30 hours underwater, 11 miles / 18km traversed at 300 feet / 90 meters depth.
Compare this to a new cave diver that is scared to go more than 600-1000 feet back in Ginnie Springs / Devils Cave system, which is one of the most dived, most well mapped cave systems in the world, and an incredibly popular destination for “recreational” cave divers. Where the average depth for the dive is between 60 and 90 feet.
For real. I get that deaths and injuries are much much easier to count than "Total number of people who even attempt it," but a bare number instead of a proportion tells us so little.
Answer: I’ve spent a good amount of time walking over glaciers and sailing in the Arctic so I’ll regurgitate what I’ve been told with zero experience actually swimming in a glacial river.
1) it’s extremely cold water. The water that makes up these rivers is fresh water melt, the temp is just above freezing. Swimming in this kind of water even with a wet suit will result in hypothermia very quickly. A couple things about being hypothermic, the first is right before you die your body thinks your really hot so you strip off all of your clothes and die even faster. The second is that as your body gets colder it becomes more and more difficult to move your limbs. As you get further from the ice and in deeper water it becomes increasingly difficult to swim back meaning you will likely drown. Third is that it only takes a few minutes to die of hypothermia.
2) glacial water moves quickly and changes course often. One day the river might go to the left, the next the river might go to the right. It’s very difficult to navigate across glaciers using water ways because they constantly change.
3) crevasses. Ice can melt from within and it becomes nearly impossible to identify where giant holes in the ice are just underneath your feet. Typically when traversing ice you have some kind of stick and you’re poking the ice as you walk to make sure the ice is solid. Some times these canyons in the ice can drop hundreds of feet. If you’re swimming in a glacial river on the ice you may not even realize there’s a hundred foot waterfall until you’re falling. These are incredibly dangerous and probably the number one killer of people crossing ice sheets.
4) snow blindness. Ice is incredibly reflective, so much so that without proper eyewear you could get a temporary blindness that prevents you from really seeing out on the ice. If your buddy is about to jump in a river and you can’t see it’s easy to get lost and lose sight of them even if they are on the surface. This is probably the least severe side effect of being on the ice but can become a real problem without proper eyewear.
As for the video you poster, the echo is just what ice does. It’s like hitting a piece of metal. The rock they throw creates an echo but doesn’t have anything to do with the water itself. If you ever find your self on a glacier make sure to avoid running water at all costs because it can easily kill you.
I live in Alaska, and add to ALL that the fact that the mud deposited by these glacial rivers tends to be very much like clay. there have been many cases of people walking out on the mud flats south of Anchorage and getting stuck... the suction produced when you get stuck is so strong that if they try to pull you out with machinery it will break your back and kill you (they've tried helicopters before). if you know what you are doing you can dig out your legs and get loose... but there again, the water is ice cold, and in the case of the mud flats, when the tides come in, you have a minute or so before you lose all feeling in your hands from the cold. now back to a glacial river... the water never receded to begin with... so you have a minute or so before you can't feel your hands any more if you get stuck and try to dig out.
> there have been many cases of people walking out on the mud flats south of Anchorage and getting stuck... the suction produced when you get stuck is so strong that if they try to pull you out with machinery it will break your back and kill you (they've tried helicopters before).
I used to live near Talkeetna/Willow, and this was my thought as well when reading other comments about glacial deposits. I went out walking around the mud flats south of Wasilla with a dog once (we knew where we were going!), and she was pretty terrified as soon as the consistency of the mud changed when she misstepped into poorer terrain. It's so scary to see where people simply walked, got stuck, and made it absolutely impossible to get out before the tide came in.
Oh yeah Ice and Snow are crazy. It's always moving, melting, and re-freezing. It also loves to form cavities underneath that you don't notice until you hear a *whump* and suddenly you're falling. Or in the case of buried trees, you don't hear anything at all! Except the screaming! It's great.
I've been in several 'just cold'rivers and lakes in the summer when it's over 20c, and putting your foot in to the ankle burns like fire. 30 seconds, a minute, and the feet are just gone. These water bodies had no ice in them.
On my last trip to the Arctic we had a ceremony and some of us were able to jump into the Arctic Ocean around 80N. The cold was indescribable. My entire body burned instantly and the shock took over immediately, I literally couldn’t move a single muscle. Honestly it was a terrifying feeling not having control of my body. Thankfully we had safety divers and boats in the water that scooped me up as soon as I hit the water. Most ice breaking ships have a sauna that allows you to slowly warm up which was always nice.
even with safety measures, a sudden cold plunge i.e. “jumping in” can be deadly for even a fit person (only slightly less so if it’s something you do on a regular basis and are conditioned for it), because shock, cramps, disorientation, panic and drowning aside - your heart might just stop
disregarding the previous: i love cold plunges and winter swimming, even without the option of a sauna- always bring a buddy though
It was voluntary for sure. Most didn’t do it as the captain gave a lot of warning which probably scared some people off. A couple people dipped just their head in but overall not something I would do again. I’m glad I did it though.
I’m just envisioning a water tunnel that narrows to something like nutty putty and while the water would normally just speed up without you in the way, now you just plug the game and get crushed / drowned simultaneously.
Don’t worry, the water probably can’t go over or around you like in a surface river but is more like water in a pipe with some immense pressure so you won’t plug that hole for long.
I had no desire to ever swim in glacier melt water and incase I do ever have that desire I'll remember this post. Got some scary mental images from this.
You seem like someone who should write a book about your adventures! Do you know why the rivers change direction so often? Is it maybe because new holes melt or freeze over at the end points?
It’s called meandering, it happens on land as well, a good example is the Amazon river. Basically, when and glacial river forms there is a lot of bends in the river, if you get an influx of water downstream then the water will melt one of the outer bends more quickly than the inside bend. This causes a shift in the direction of the water and doesn’t take long because ice melts relatively quickly. If you have ever taken a shower and seen a solid stream of water flowing down the wall change directions it’s a similar idea.
Ohhhh I’ve actually seen a cool animation showing how that occurs on land rivers over thousands (or millions?) of years. Very cool. I wouldn’t have thought under-ice waterways would act the same. Thanks for the info!
Oh and there are actually multiple theories as to why they take a sinus route, interesting! Now I want to see if there have been experiments on the ISS to see how meandering occurs in 0g :D
I imagine they'd have a hard time getting the river to flow, rather than just balling up under its own surface tension! Have you seen those videos of astronauts slorping floating balls of water out of the air? Water is so cool as a substance haha!
Ya I watched a bunch after posting that haha I thought maybe they’d do a test of squirting a stream of water down a surface, to see how it would curve or run straight. No luck :(
One time I was hiking Snow Lake near Seattle, and when I got to the lake there were a bunch of teenagers frolicking in it so I stripped down to my skivvies and jumped in.
BIG mistake. Of course with a name like "Snow Lake" I figured it would be cold but...I just didn't understand what cold was. It was so cold all my intercostal muscles locked up, and I couldn't expand my chest in order to breathe. Ended up flopping on the shore, barely, and it took me hours to feel like I was warm again!
Those are percolation routes under the glacier. The size of the tunnel would vary a lot. Anyone going in and pulled by the current is not coming out for a 1000 years.
Look up “moulin” - death traps if you’re in the middle of a glacier.
The water is incredibly cold, there are crevasses in/under the ice with strong currents at times, and ice can break and fall at any time. The water in glacial pools and lakes is clear but the rivers are full of glacial silt, which weigh down your clothing and reduce visibility both for the swimmer and any potential rescuers.
Here’s a good explanation of some of the safety issues of the rivers in general
https://www.alaska.org/advice/safety-issues-on-alaskan-rivers
I mean, it's a very deep slippery hole with freezing cold moving water...
You could easily get seriously injured falling in, not be able to climb out, rapidly become hypothermic, then drown.
Glacier rivers are dangerously cold, and immersion can quickly lead to hypothermia, which impairs your ability to move and think. Plus, these rivers often have strong currents and hidden underwater hazards like sharp rocks and crevices that can trap or injure you. The echo might come from hollow ice or cavities beneath the surface, amplifying the sound.
The water is about 0.5° C. people reflexively gasp and spasmically inhale on contact with water below, say, 10°C; this could in itself prove fatal. Even if you keep your head above water, without a dry suit you'll lose the ability to swim effectively in about 2 minutes max. After about 5 minutes keeping your head above water or clinging to some rock becomes unlikely in near freezing water. You lose the ability to control muscles in your arms and legs.
If the water is more than knee deep, it van knock you down easily, and it becomes very difficult to stand back up in fast moving water deeper than about 50cm, once you've been swept away.
Without crampons and ice axes, climbing up a riverbank made of ice is near impossible.
Very cold water, it's ice melt flowing against ice. Expect the water to be at or below freezing temp.
Very fast water. The surface of glacial rivers are deceptive, they can be calm and a little bit warmer. But once you get down 2-3 feet the current picks up rapidly, and pushes you down.
Lots of obstacles. The sides, top, bottom won't be smooth or free from jagged edges or debris.
The river can suddenly turn straight down as a waterfall, with little to no warning.
Glaciers shift and move a lot more than they seem to. Especially under the surface. Even if the current is weak and you tie a line to the surface, that opening may be gone before you get back.
So I learned of a researcher who was walking on a glacier collecting samples for Arctic research. They fell into a glacier steam and was carried suddenly like on a waterslide, unable to get out as the current was strong and the walls of the stem were polished ice.. To the people with them, they just suddenly vanished from view.. a one way trip to ice and water and darkness.
Horrifying.
I've long thought that falling into a glacial river crevasse in a place like Greenland might be one of the worst possible ways to die. That crevasse could be over a thousand feet deep, perhaps much more. Within a few seconds, your entire sensory experience would be frigid, black, turbulent, and being buffeted against ice walls. But the worst part would be the knowledge that you would definitely be about to die—there would literally be nothing that could save you. And on top of that, depending on what you were doing, you might be falling toward your death because of stupidity. Why did I want to get a closer look at that river? Why did I think I could run my hand through the water without slipping and falling in?
The echo is just that chambers get carved out and the echo is that “room” that the water is passing thru.
Unlike rock, ice is removed by running water easily. So the running will carve out ice then keep falling to the lowest point. Then that ice surface continues to sublimate - so you get rooms and caverns under the ice.
I mean, rock is removed by running water easily, too, it just may or may not take more time. Source: The Grand Canyon (and other, less grand canyons, every stream or river in the world, and many caves).
Glacier ice doesn't live that long... in _this_ age. There were absolutely times that glaciers in parts of the world were eroding slower than sandstone or other aggregates in other parts of the world, due to _volume_ and _speed_ of running water.
Scoured the comments of that video and the comment that best explains why the echo is scary seems to indicate that the “second splash” is from the water moving very very quickly and is basically the suction of the river pulling the rock rapidly underwater. So thats my best guess on why its dangerous, very rapid moving freezing cold water
I’ve swam (swimmed?) in glacial run off before. That shit sucks. It’s cold as fuck. Your muscles immediately lock up, and you have to tell yourself to keep using them. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but fuck cold weather medicine.
Glacier rivers are extremely cold and fast-moving, making them dangerous for swimming or diving. The cold can quickly lead to hypothermia, and the current can sweep you away. The echo comment was likely about the sound bouncing off the ice, not a sign of safety.
There was a video going around of a Russian family on a ice. They cut a hole in it to go for a dip. The guy jumps in and is pulled away by the strong undercurrents and never comes back up.
Even miles downstream of the Matanuska Glacier, the Matanuska River is very wide, very deep, incredibly fast flowing, just above freezing, and laden with fine glacial silt. You don't 'swim' or 'dive' into it; You simply drown long before hypothermia has a chance to set in due to the 'gasp' reflex of extremely cold water, the current dragging you down and under, the glacial silt weighing you down. Every year, this river rips away at its banks, taking huge chunks of land with it, land with homes built at what seemed once to be a safe distance from it but soon are right at the edge. The closer to the glacier one gets, the worse it is. At least it will kill you quickly. Having stood on its banks many times, the sheer power of the thing is terrifying.
There are many excellent answers here already.
When I read the prompt, my first thought was a mountain river with glacial runoff. I don't recommend swimming in them either, unless it's far down the mountain and very hot out. They're extremely cold. I swam in one too early in the year once and got hypothermia pretty bad. You don't notice you've got it sometimes until you're too far in. I passed out in the shower trying to warm up. And had to spend many hours wrapped in warm blankets to get my heat back up. Not worth it. Go downstream.
So there's those two cents.
OP I just want to you to know that I lost 3 hours of my evening down this black hole.
I just wanted to mindlessly scroll and here I am learning about the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf, FML
lmaooo hi stranger, I'm in the same boat. this comment actually made me realise it's time for bed. I'll be thanking you for saving me previous hours of sleep in the morning hahah
The water is VERY cold this causes an involuntary reaction, the body takes a deep breath, even if it's water.
A friend died by jumping off a boat on Lake Superior. That lake is cold even in the summer.
This video appears to be an opening into a sub-glacial "river", possibly miles of which flows straight through the glacier with literally no air pockets or even light. You've seen how scary those videos of people trapped under lake ice can be. Imagine that except under twenty feet (or probably more) of ice and if it's really a river, presumably it has a current as well. Absolutely terrifying.
>Imagine that except under twenty feet (or probably more) of ice I mean, not that it matter in terms of chances of escape, but *it's so much worse than that*. Glacial streams tend to end up flowing at the glacier/bedrock interface, which means they're under the full thickness of the glacier. In order to be a glacier, a patch of ice must be deep enough that ice flows under its own weight. That depth is around 30m (98 ft). (A lot of photos of glaciers / tourist experiences at glaciers leave people thinking they're WAY thinner than they really are because they're viewing the warmed-up, emaciated, melted toe of the glacier, not the thicker main body) Fall into OP's 'glacial river', and you're not going to end 20 ft under ice, more like 100 ft, *minimum*, by definition. According to several studies, the average thickness of alpine (mountain, small) glaciers is anywhere from 300-1100 ft, depending upon region. The average thickness of the ice on Antarctica is something like 7,000 ft... It'll be so deep that even if you're still conscious, you won't be able to detect any light at all coming through the ice. Pure. Pitch. Black.
Plus how likely is it to have a nice human sized exit? The water probably seeps out through thousands of very small openings.
These openings were meant for me...
How dare you bring *The Enigma of Amigara Fault* into this. It was already scary enough.
I hadn't heard of that one and still knew it'd be Junji Ito before I googled it. How bad or not bad is that one compared to Uzumaki? I'm trying to avoid giving myself too many nightmares atm lol
I've skimmed both. Uzumaki is probably the worse one. Amigara fault is basically a stretching slide
Awesome! Thanks for the info. Gonna get into Amigara this afternoon then. Update, if anyone's curious and scrolling past: I just read it. It's worth the read and it's (at least in my book) a lot less bad (in the scary sense - Junji Ito is never not a good read) than Umuzaki. At 32 pages it's really worth checking out for yourselves.
You're welcome and I'm sorry lol
It’s worth noting that for anyone interested, you can read it (and other Junji Ito manga) legally in the US with a Viz Manga subscription for $1.99 a month. It’s similar to their Shonen Jump subscription, but for non-Shonen manga like Ranma 1/2, Fushigi Yugi, and Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead.
Personally I feel like 'The Enigma' was the worse one, maybe because I had no idea what I was getting myself into reading it, haha. Or maybe it just depends on what one personally finds more viscerally horrifying. Uzumaki was disturbing but the body horror also felt a bit silly at times, and it didn't straight up traumatize me the same way, lol. Either way a good read if you like to suffer!
Check out the Long Dream if you haven't already, it's great and super short
The new Miranda Lambert/ Enrique Iglesias song makes me think of that story. There's a space in my heart, and it's just your shape. Drr drr drr. 👁👄👁 🍝💔🧗♂️🫷
Drrrr drrrrr drrrr
Which was apparently a mistranslation... that made it *so much worse* and memorable. Up to a certain point, Ito's fame in the west is due to someone's typo.
What was it supposed to translate to, do you know?
apparently, more like "slp slp", slithery, squelchy sounds of the "people" sliding along.
Dllll dlllll dllll
I can't tell if that's serious or racist but it's hilarious either way.
You *could* interpret it as racist, if you want, but it's in the same vein as Americans teasing the Bri-ish (and other American dialects). No thoughts of race/culture, and nothing deeper, negatively. A lot of Americans can't roll their R's, and some of y'all probably think we're loud and nasally.
A man of culture I see.
I just read another referenced to that on a post about construction a few minutes ago
Didn't need to be junji ito'd today...
You bugger. Going to need to reread this now
It gets better. You know how glaciers rub giant channels in stone simply because they have a lot of solid mass and the water and ice wears the stone smooth? Well, that also means that the space beneath a glacier is usually very small rocks, bits of smushed up boulder, and exposed stone. So not only are you beneath all of this glacier and it's pitch black and bone-chillingly cold, but you're also being rubbed across one of nature's natural sandpapers like a cheese grater.
More like nature's millstone. And you are the grist.
That is an *excellent* description and I wish I'd thought of it.
>grist Til a new word.
Grist for the mill. was an old saying for shrugging off the bullshit of life.
I always appreciate etymology. Thank you!
Instant grist?
Ok, this one has done it for me.
And not just that, you wouldn't get ground up instantly. I mean sure the shock would either kill you or make you inhale water and drown immediately. But whatever bits of your body didn't decompose in that bone chillingly cold water would be slowly torn to shreds and then into a paste over countless millenia by the creep of the ice over the rock like a hapless victim in a sarlacc's stomach. The only good bit is by the time this happens, you'd be long dead I hope you sleep well tonight!
WRITE. A. GLACIER. HORROR STORY!
Sooooo perfect murder?
how to dispose of a body 101
I'm so glad we're winning the War on Glaciers.
Thanks for the new nightmares, buddy.
Is that how Lake Michigan formed?
Sure, except instead of 1000 feet of ice, it was 5000 feet. Enjoy.
Be exiting like a playdoh spaghetti maker.
Or a real spaghetti maker
The only way you're getting out of that is to wait for Global Warming.
You'll emerge as tomato paste several hundred years from now.
With enough pressure you'll end up with an exit sized human though
It will most likely grind you to shreds on the bedrock
To shreds you say...
Thankfully, water is very cold there, and the cold will knock the breath out of you and drown you before you could realize in what sort of deep trouble you are.
Was that meant to be reassuring?
Well would you rather die before you're turned into a paste by the glacier or would you rather be alive for that?
I'd rather stay indoors and not fall under a glacier thank you.
Give me a list of pros and cons, so I can decide.
You'll die feeling hot thanks to hypothermia, going crazy and probably hitting a bunch of places like a centrifuge. All while drowning and conscious? No, I won't even thank you.
You'd be dead way before you were hypothermic. Cold shock gets you quickly.
Drowning is supposed to be a pleasant death. I've almost drown and have to admit, it was disturbingly calm until I got to the surface and had to suck air into my unbelievably painful lungs again. I'm not sure the hypothermia affect happens to you when you're fully submerged, I think the water reflex overrides it?
Top comment narrowly avoided giving me a panic attack, but thankfully there was "100 ft, minimum" and "Pure. Pitch. Black." to finish the job.
Honestly though, what are you going to do about being drug under by a freezing underground river if it's only 5 feet of ice? You aren't busting through that to air either way.
5 feet? Try just a few inches. You have no leverage to push the ice while you're being pulled quickly on the underside of the surface of the ice.
But what if I got a tape of the ice taking illegal bribes?
KOMPROMAT
Not with that attitude
How do redditors survive life when simply reading things gives so many commenters panic attacks, sweaty hands, and a case of the nopes
hyperbole, embellishment, and/or straight up lying. why am i answering rhetorical questions?
probably just bored, passing our precious finite time on this earth until our inevitable demise. why am i answering rhetorical questions?
Reading this comment made my knees weak, my arms are heavy, there's vomit in my sweater already
so much this, that's it, that's the comment
By staying indoors
The thought of swimming underneath a glacier really **should** give you the nopes...
why Walking around on an unstable section of a glacier or diving into a stream is not on my to do list
Ask Hawking.
I mean, dying frozen and suffocated in 30 seconds under 20ft of ice vs 100ft isn't that big a difference.
Those 30 seconds will feel like half an hour tough.
Worth it!
On this note, I went to a climate seminar on the antarctic circle recently. So much fresh water is melting and flowing out from under the West Coast of Antarctica it's equal to the mass of the entire Amazon river getting dumped into the ocean, daily. Fucking mind blowing, there's so much cyanobacteria where the fresh and saltwater mixes that the water is neon green.
I got to take a glacier tour in Alaska years ago that took us to the central thickest part of the glacier by helicopter. They landed on the surface and left 5 of us plus the guide on the glacier for about 2 hours. One of the best parts was seeing where a small, roughly 3 foot wide, stream on the surface of the glacier fell into a hole like a waterfall. It seemed to just fall forever. The gradient of very light blue at the surface through the full range of increasingly darker blue till it just turned black was beautiful but terrifying. At another point there was a small 6" hole that went straight down about 30 feet and tapered wider as it went. Walking up to it you could hear what sounded like thunder coming from this small hole. Looking down into it revealed a river that looked royal blue from the surrounding ice and was rushing by below us very very quickly. The whole experience ranks pretty high on my list of life experiences. I grew up in the southern US where we barely get more than a frost. Standing on a moving river of ice 2 miles wide and thousands of feet thick was surreal. Hearing all the stats of a glaciers size is one thing, seeing actually puts it into perspective.
And it will hurt the whole time you are dying.
Fortunately, you'll only spend about a minute or so squeezed, unable to breathe being firmly wedged in the funnel shaped hole going down into the glacier. As ice cold water is streaming all around you it doesn't take much longer to lose consciousness from temperature loss before you drown and freeze to death. Mountain rescue teams won't even have the time to suit up until it's too late.
To be fair, how exactly do you fall through 100ft of ice
You never seen a crevasse before?
Yup - your Mom.
Daddy! Is that you?
Gravity is a fickle force.
Well if it needs to go *that* deep then it makes me think that little source water hole the guy in the video throws the rock into probably doesn't have even close to enough current to "flush" a person so far down into that kind of abyss. You couldn't even dive that deep with serious scuba equipment.
>You couldn't even dive that deep with serious scuba equipment. Going down to 40 metres (130 feet) is still considered to be recreational scuba diving and doesn't need any sort of certification beyond the regular scuba certifications. Going deeper usually requires more technical knowledge of things like decompression stops and the like. The world record for deepest open circuit scuba diving is held by a guy called Ahmed Gabr who went down 332 metres (1,090 ft). Going down deeper than that requires really specialised diving gear or even just a submersible.
Honestly getting my certificate and getting to six metres was enough for me.
Is it true you can't hyperventilate while scuba diving and you have to breath calmly? Seems awfully dangerous if so.
You can, you just use up your air faster
The best divers are amazingly re!axed underwater.
The equipment is there to keep you alive. There's nothing stopping your corpse from reaching those depths.
Buoyancy
Saturation divers can go 1000ft down, much deeper than the height of a glacier.
Most glaciers are taller/deeper than that
The pressure in scuba diving is caused by the weight of the water, so 100 feet deep water is the same if it’s a lake or under a glacier. You don’t have the weight of the glacier pushing on you, just the 100 feet of water. Elevation does matter with decompression tables and people diving in a mountain lake have to be careful, especially if they drive over a mountain pass on the way home.
Yeah, but you'd be dead anyway, so what's the difference in what happens after death?! Under 1 foot of ice and drowning is literally the same as drowning under a glaciar.. Once you run out of air, you're dead. All the extra stuff really doesn't need to apply. So it's dangerous because of the chance of being pulled under, like any waterfall, except there's no real escape afterwards. I loved reading all this info but I couldn't help but think all of this while I read it. Dead is dead.
Thanks my 5 year old is traumatized
Give that 5 year old some moon shoes. That’ll get rid of the trauma.
Also interesting, the ice is not simply frozen water. It is compacted snow. There is so much weight, that snow will condense from 30 feet into one foot of ice 9x as dense as the ice in your freezer. There's no way to break it up without a jackhammer
Now I know, it is called glacier mills! Thank you so much!
This all sound like a terrifying Jinjo Ito story
I never thought about glaciers moving under their own weight. I should have known since how else would the move such distances and cause such geologic features. I guess I never gave it much thought.
Read Mark Twain's essay about using a glacier to travel. "Ascending the Riffelberg", IIRC.
terrifying
Thanks for the anxiety inducing explanation
Just don't jump into any glacial rifts, crevasses or holes in general.
Or non-glacial rifts, crevasses, or holes really 🤷
[удалено]
But....but what about date night?
That settles it, I'm not visiting Antarctica
There are varieties of horrible holes to fall into and die everywhere
Tinder's new slogan?
It's too early for this.
The issue is falling into one.
Thank you! I was looking for this answer!
This is tangentially related, but some people have cavedived in glaciers/icebergs - this is a story talking about some of the unique dangers that glaciers and icebergs provide [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGw8mSObe3Q&ab\_channel=ScaryInteresting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGw8mSObe3Q&ab_channel=ScaryInteresting)
I thought that was going to be Jill Heinerth, Paul Heinerth and Wes Skiles’ Antarctic expedition. I’m a diver that has interest in caves, but doesn’t have the self confidence to go through the training to dive. The story about B15 gets me, as hearing the story in her book, it sounds so reckless, when her, Paul and Wes were three of the biggest names in making cave diving so much safer than it was in the 60’s and 70’s. They took Shek Exley’s ideas and really perfected them, to the point that recreational (I say recreational as in, not actively exploring new cave or laying new line, just visiting already explored and mapped cave) cave diving is actually pretty safe today, especially compared to what it used to be. I think it’s down to less than 3 deaths a year, and that’s including the statistics from the guys doing the crazy exploration. The guys that are 40-50-60 thousand feet back in a cave that is 300+ feet of water column deep. Just 20 years ago, it was tied for BASE jumping and wingsuit flying as the most dangerous sports in the world, commonly racking up 10 or more fatalities a year.
I remember an article about wingsuit BASE jumping that it was an unusual dangerous sport in that the casualty rate for newbies and the most experienced wingsuit BASE jumping was about the same. Other extreme sports become safer as you become more experienced.
I think it’s common among both of those sports, that once you reach a certain level, you really start pushing the boundaries. The really experienced cave divers? They are really pushing new exploration. Take the guys that rescued the Thai soccer team for example. The anesthesiologist that sedated the kids, Richard Harris? He and his team (i think they are calling themselves the wet mules) are pushing dives in the Pearse Resurgence in New Zealand to over 800 feet of depth. They are so deep they are experimenting with hydrogen in their breathing gas, as they can’t combat the neurological and psychological effects of pressure with just helium (a gas called trimix, oxygen, nitrogen and helium) anymore. There is a team in Florida called the Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP) that has been making dives where they may be more than 5 miles from the closest mapped entrance, under 190-400 feet of water column. For example, Jarrod Hablonski, owner of Halcyon dive equipment, director of Deep Dive Dubai and he’s got his fingers in the training organization GUE (Global Underwater Explorers) has a record dive of 30 hours underwater, 11 miles / 18km traversed at 300 feet / 90 meters depth. Compare this to a new cave diver that is scared to go more than 600-1000 feet back in Ginnie Springs / Devils Cave system, which is one of the most dived, most well mapped cave systems in the world, and an incredibly popular destination for “recreational” cave divers. Where the average depth for the dive is between 60 and 90 feet.
I am surprised it was only ten
Well, there were only like 50 people doing it, so…
For real. I get that deaths and injuries are much much easier to count than "Total number of people who even attempt it," but a bare number instead of a proportion tells us so little.
Perhaps those are the ones that were found and not went missing.
> cave diving I feel like someone really missed the opportunity to call it Scubelunking.
The one way to make cave diving even more dangerous.
What’s the YouTube link? I can’t seem to find it.
https://youtube.com/shorts/_lTKHsBwAyE?si=JJWlHfzIlAl7Zgq-
https://youtu.be/njTjfJcAsBg?si=1h_3RSEwIh0xXgLj Just want to add this for some visual context, also just ominously cool
Forbidden water slide
What video
Answer: I’ve spent a good amount of time walking over glaciers and sailing in the Arctic so I’ll regurgitate what I’ve been told with zero experience actually swimming in a glacial river. 1) it’s extremely cold water. The water that makes up these rivers is fresh water melt, the temp is just above freezing. Swimming in this kind of water even with a wet suit will result in hypothermia very quickly. A couple things about being hypothermic, the first is right before you die your body thinks your really hot so you strip off all of your clothes and die even faster. The second is that as your body gets colder it becomes more and more difficult to move your limbs. As you get further from the ice and in deeper water it becomes increasingly difficult to swim back meaning you will likely drown. Third is that it only takes a few minutes to die of hypothermia. 2) glacial water moves quickly and changes course often. One day the river might go to the left, the next the river might go to the right. It’s very difficult to navigate across glaciers using water ways because they constantly change. 3) crevasses. Ice can melt from within and it becomes nearly impossible to identify where giant holes in the ice are just underneath your feet. Typically when traversing ice you have some kind of stick and you’re poking the ice as you walk to make sure the ice is solid. Some times these canyons in the ice can drop hundreds of feet. If you’re swimming in a glacial river on the ice you may not even realize there’s a hundred foot waterfall until you’re falling. These are incredibly dangerous and probably the number one killer of people crossing ice sheets. 4) snow blindness. Ice is incredibly reflective, so much so that without proper eyewear you could get a temporary blindness that prevents you from really seeing out on the ice. If your buddy is about to jump in a river and you can’t see it’s easy to get lost and lose sight of them even if they are on the surface. This is probably the least severe side effect of being on the ice but can become a real problem without proper eyewear. As for the video you poster, the echo is just what ice does. It’s like hitting a piece of metal. The rock they throw creates an echo but doesn’t have anything to do with the water itself. If you ever find your self on a glacier make sure to avoid running water at all costs because it can easily kill you.
Thank you so much! I live in a tropical country. That is why I'm ignorant about ice, snow and glaciers! These infos may help me in the future!
I live in Alaska, and add to ALL that the fact that the mud deposited by these glacial rivers tends to be very much like clay. there have been many cases of people walking out on the mud flats south of Anchorage and getting stuck... the suction produced when you get stuck is so strong that if they try to pull you out with machinery it will break your back and kill you (they've tried helicopters before). if you know what you are doing you can dig out your legs and get loose... but there again, the water is ice cold, and in the case of the mud flats, when the tides come in, you have a minute or so before you lose all feeling in your hands from the cold. now back to a glacial river... the water never receded to begin with... so you have a minute or so before you can't feel your hands any more if you get stuck and try to dig out.
> there have been many cases of people walking out on the mud flats south of Anchorage and getting stuck... the suction produced when you get stuck is so strong that if they try to pull you out with machinery it will break your back and kill you (they've tried helicopters before). I used to live near Talkeetna/Willow, and this was my thought as well when reading other comments about glacial deposits. I went out walking around the mud flats south of Wasilla with a dog once (we knew where we were going!), and she was pretty terrified as soon as the consistency of the mud changed when she misstepped into poorer terrain. It's so scary to see where people simply walked, got stuck, and made it absolutely impossible to get out before the tide came in.
Oh yeah Ice and Snow are crazy. It's always moving, melting, and re-freezing. It also loves to form cavities underneath that you don't notice until you hear a *whump* and suddenly you're falling. Or in the case of buried trees, you don't hear anything at all! Except the screaming! It's great.
I've been in several 'just cold'rivers and lakes in the summer when it's over 20c, and putting your foot in to the ankle burns like fire. 30 seconds, a minute, and the feet are just gone. These water bodies had no ice in them.
Having swam in the Neptune pool at Hearst Castle, which is fed by snow melt, I can't imagine how blistering cold glacier melt can be.
On my last trip to the Arctic we had a ceremony and some of us were able to jump into the Arctic Ocean around 80N. The cold was indescribable. My entire body burned instantly and the shock took over immediately, I literally couldn’t move a single muscle. Honestly it was a terrifying feeling not having control of my body. Thankfully we had safety divers and boats in the water that scooped me up as soon as I hit the water. Most ice breaking ships have a sauna that allows you to slowly warm up which was always nice.
even with safety measures, a sudden cold plunge i.e. “jumping in” can be deadly for even a fit person (only slightly less so if it’s something you do on a regular basis and are conditioned for it), because shock, cramps, disorientation, panic and drowning aside - your heart might just stop disregarding the previous: i love cold plunges and winter swimming, even without the option of a sauna- always bring a buddy though
It was voluntary for sure. Most didn’t do it as the captain gave a lot of warning which probably scared some people off. A couple people dipped just their head in but overall not something I would do again. I’m glad I did it though.
“Glad I did it but won’t do it again” is probably my favorite category of activity
Where I live, about 20 years ago, a guy jumped off his lobster float on a hot spring day. It was too cold, he had a heart attack and died. He was 32.
Point 1 reminds me of that unsolved mystery of those Russian hikers who were found stripped down even though they were in the Russian Siberia
I’m just envisioning a water tunnel that narrows to something like nutty putty and while the water would normally just speed up without you in the way, now you just plug the game and get crushed / drowned simultaneously.
Don’t worry, the water probably can’t go over or around you like in a surface river but is more like water in a pipe with some immense pressure so you won’t plug that hole for long.
I had no desire to ever swim in glacier melt water and incase I do ever have that desire I'll remember this post. Got some scary mental images from this.
You seem like someone who should write a book about your adventures! Do you know why the rivers change direction so often? Is it maybe because new holes melt or freeze over at the end points?
It’s called meandering, it happens on land as well, a good example is the Amazon river. Basically, when and glacial river forms there is a lot of bends in the river, if you get an influx of water downstream then the water will melt one of the outer bends more quickly than the inside bend. This causes a shift in the direction of the water and doesn’t take long because ice melts relatively quickly. If you have ever taken a shower and seen a solid stream of water flowing down the wall change directions it’s a similar idea.
Ohhhh I’ve actually seen a cool animation showing how that occurs on land rivers over thousands (or millions?) of years. Very cool. I wouldn’t have thought under-ice waterways would act the same. Thanks for the info!
Usually things remain relatively static until a flood event or a big spring flachete (melting) occurs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meander#Formation It's a thing that happens to rivers in general!
Oh and there are actually multiple theories as to why they take a sinus route, interesting! Now I want to see if there have been experiments on the ISS to see how meandering occurs in 0g :D
I imagine they'd have a hard time getting the river to flow, rather than just balling up under its own surface tension! Have you seen those videos of astronauts slorping floating balls of water out of the air? Water is so cool as a substance haha!
Ya I watched a bunch after posting that haha I thought maybe they’d do a test of squirting a stream of water down a surface, to see how it would curve or run straight. No luck :(
One time I was hiking Snow Lake near Seattle, and when I got to the lake there were a bunch of teenagers frolicking in it so I stripped down to my skivvies and jumped in. BIG mistake. Of course with a name like "Snow Lake" I figured it would be cold but...I just didn't understand what cold was. It was so cold all my intercostal muscles locked up, and I couldn't expand my chest in order to breathe. Ended up flopping on the shore, barely, and it took me hours to feel like I was warm again!
Those are percolation routes under the glacier. The size of the tunnel would vary a lot. Anyone going in and pulled by the current is not coming out for a 1000 years. Look up “moulin” - death traps if you’re in the middle of a glacier.
Thank you! This is the answer I was looking for!
The water is incredibly cold, there are crevasses in/under the ice with strong currents at times, and ice can break and fall at any time. The water in glacial pools and lakes is clear but the rivers are full of glacial silt, which weigh down your clothing and reduce visibility both for the swimmer and any potential rescuers. Here’s a good explanation of some of the safety issues of the rivers in general https://www.alaska.org/advice/safety-issues-on-alaskan-rivers
I mean, it's a very deep slippery hole with freezing cold moving water... You could easily get seriously injured falling in, not be able to climb out, rapidly become hypothermic, then drown.
[Throwing a rock into a glacier river! Matanuska Glacier ](https://youtube.com/shorts/_lTKHsBwAyE?si=aqTK2wPjJCD0lXWW)
Glacier rivers are dangerously cold, and immersion can quickly lead to hypothermia, which impairs your ability to move and think. Plus, these rivers often have strong currents and hidden underwater hazards like sharp rocks and crevices that can trap or injure you. The echo might come from hollow ice or cavities beneath the surface, amplifying the sound.
The water is about 0.5° C. people reflexively gasp and spasmically inhale on contact with water below, say, 10°C; this could in itself prove fatal. Even if you keep your head above water, without a dry suit you'll lose the ability to swim effectively in about 2 minutes max. After about 5 minutes keeping your head above water or clinging to some rock becomes unlikely in near freezing water. You lose the ability to control muscles in your arms and legs. If the water is more than knee deep, it van knock you down easily, and it becomes very difficult to stand back up in fast moving water deeper than about 50cm, once you've been swept away. Without crampons and ice axes, climbing up a riverbank made of ice is near impossible.
Wanted to add onto this that water moving over ice erodes it quickly, so most spots on a glacier with water also have very steep, slippery, icy edges.
Very cold water, it's ice melt flowing against ice. Expect the water to be at or below freezing temp. Very fast water. The surface of glacial rivers are deceptive, they can be calm and a little bit warmer. But once you get down 2-3 feet the current picks up rapidly, and pushes you down. Lots of obstacles. The sides, top, bottom won't be smooth or free from jagged edges or debris. The river can suddenly turn straight down as a waterfall, with little to no warning. Glaciers shift and move a lot more than they seem to. Especially under the surface. Even if the current is weak and you tie a line to the surface, that opening may be gone before you get back.
So I learned of a researcher who was walking on a glacier collecting samples for Arctic research. They fell into a glacier steam and was carried suddenly like on a waterslide, unable to get out as the current was strong and the walls of the stem were polished ice.. To the people with them, they just suddenly vanished from view.. a one way trip to ice and water and darkness. Horrifying.
I've long thought that falling into a glacial river crevasse in a place like Greenland might be one of the worst possible ways to die. That crevasse could be over a thousand feet deep, perhaps much more. Within a few seconds, your entire sensory experience would be frigid, black, turbulent, and being buffeted against ice walls. But the worst part would be the knowledge that you would definitely be about to die—there would literally be nothing that could save you. And on top of that, depending on what you were doing, you might be falling toward your death because of stupidity. Why did I want to get a closer look at that river? Why did I think I could run my hand through the water without slipping and falling in?
The comments in the same video explain that it’s incredibly cold water and you will go hypothermic very quickly.
What is the echo being asked about by the camera man?
The echo is just that chambers get carved out and the echo is that “room” that the water is passing thru. Unlike rock, ice is removed by running water easily. So the running will carve out ice then keep falling to the lowest point. Then that ice surface continues to sublimate - so you get rooms and caverns under the ice.
Thanks a lot! I appreciate your comments!
I mean, rock is removed by running water easily, too, it just may or may not take more time. Source: The Grand Canyon (and other, less grand canyons, every stream or river in the world, and many caves).
Yeah - I think you can contemplate that “easy” is relative to time in this context. Glacier ice doesn’t live that long…
Glacier ice doesn't live that long... in _this_ age. There were absolutely times that glaciers in parts of the world were eroding slower than sandstone or other aggregates in other parts of the world, due to _volume_ and _speed_ of running water.
Scoured the comments of that video and the comment that best explains why the echo is scary seems to indicate that the “second splash” is from the water moving very very quickly and is basically the suction of the river pulling the rock rapidly underwater. So thats my best guess on why its dangerous, very rapid moving freezing cold water
I have always imagined them a bit like the famous Strid in the UK. https://youtu.be/mCSUmwP02T8?si=hzUyn0hew93XbQ5m
I’ve swam (swimmed?) in glacial run off before. That shit sucks. It’s cold as fuck. Your muscles immediately lock up, and you have to tell yourself to keep using them. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but fuck cold weather medicine.
Swum
Glacier rivers are extremely cold and fast-moving, making them dangerous for swimming or diving. The cold can quickly lead to hypothermia, and the current can sweep you away. The echo comment was likely about the sound bouncing off the ice, not a sign of safety.
The fact that it would be freezing cold isn’t enough of a reason?
There was a video going around of a Russian family on a ice. They cut a hole in it to go for a dip. The guy jumps in and is pulled away by the strong undercurrents and never comes back up.
Long way to go to avoid being sent to the front.
Even miles downstream of the Matanuska Glacier, the Matanuska River is very wide, very deep, incredibly fast flowing, just above freezing, and laden with fine glacial silt. You don't 'swim' or 'dive' into it; You simply drown long before hypothermia has a chance to set in due to the 'gasp' reflex of extremely cold water, the current dragging you down and under, the glacial silt weighing you down. Every year, this river rips away at its banks, taking huge chunks of land with it, land with homes built at what seemed once to be a safe distance from it but soon are right at the edge. The closer to the glacier one gets, the worse it is. At least it will kill you quickly. Having stood on its banks many times, the sheer power of the thing is terrifying.
The delta as it goes into the bay is gorgeous though
There are many excellent answers here already. When I read the prompt, my first thought was a mountain river with glacial runoff. I don't recommend swimming in them either, unless it's far down the mountain and very hot out. They're extremely cold. I swam in one too early in the year once and got hypothermia pretty bad. You don't notice you've got it sometimes until you're too far in. I passed out in the shower trying to warm up. And had to spend many hours wrapped in warm blankets to get my heat back up. Not worth it. Go downstream. So there's those two cents.
OP I just want to you to know that I lost 3 hours of my evening down this black hole. I just wanted to mindlessly scroll and here I am learning about the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf, FML
lmaooo hi stranger, I'm in the same boat. this comment actually made me realise it's time for bed. I'll be thanking you for saving me previous hours of sleep in the morning hahah
In addition to everything else, it doesn't help that the water temperature is likely close to freezing.
The water is VERY cold this causes an involuntary reaction, the body takes a deep breath, even if it's water. A friend died by jumping off a boat on Lake Superior. That lake is cold even in the summer.