Just 12 miles outside of downtown Juneau, Alaska sits a massive glacier that’s as stunning on the outside as it is beneath it. The 12 mile long Mendenhall Glacier is a special treat for adventurous-types or photographers like Kent Mearig who travel underneath the glacier to explore and photograph its otherworldly ice caves. Mearig has lived in Juneau for the last 20 years and, lucky for us, over the years he’s developed such a special relationship with the glacier that he’s able to photograph it in truly spectacular ways.
His gorgeous photos feature bright blue ceilings of ice above as well as the flowing water over rocks below. The series, which he calls Subglacial World, even show passageways that look like portals to another side. It’s a brilliantly colored world just waiting to be explored.
“Sometimes I can get complacent about the photographic opportunities on the surface of glaciers or even in their caves, but this photo represents a truly once-in-a-lifetime situation. This cavernous tunnel is actually running through the middle of an iceberg, and the iceberg is frozen in the Mendenhall Lake.”