The ship rocked as huge swells, created by the calving of South Sawyer Glacier in Tracy Arm fjord, passed below us. Countless harbor seals and their pups were resting on growlers and bergy bits nearby as we witnessed pieces of ice fourteen stories high calving from the glacier's terminus.
Southeastern Alaska has been shaped by the advance and retreat of glacial ice over the last 2 million years. The ice has been slowly retreating since the Pleistocene, allowing magnificent fjords to form, exposing the glacially carved u-shaped valleys. Amazingly enough, the walls in this fjord steeply rise to heights of more than 2,000 feet and plunge to water depths exceeding 1,200 feet. Huge scour marks can be seen in the metamorphic rock faces that were created as the glacier bulldozed its way through this narrow passage.
