This undulating, ghostly landscape of dead trees rooted in sand dunes might bring to mind the surrealist art of Salvador Dalí or the always striking Namib Desert, but it’s actually a zoomed-in view—just a few yards across—of an Icelandic glacier’s meltwater, illustrating a geological process seldom captured in such mesmerizing, dynamic detail. Glaciers sometimes grow tongues: long, narrow ice streams that extend downhill, usually toward a body of water. These formations can be unstable, and are more prone to bouts of rapid melting than larger masses of ice are. In…
