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Gallery: the icy blue shades of Svalbard

January 15, 2026 / 56 Comments

She had never known that ice could take on so many shades of blue: sharp lines of indigo like the deepest sea, aquamarine shadows, even the glint of blue-green where the sun struck just so.

Malinda Lo, Huntress

I confess I have never heard of Malinda Lo, nor read her novel Huntress, but when searching for a quote to capture the essence of this gallery, that one stood out. I think we tend to think of ice as clear, or maybe white like snow; the images in this gallery will show that it is anything but!

As the quote says, ice can come in all shades of blue. There is a scientific reason for this. Dense, pure ice appears blue to our eyes because it absorbs longer wavelengths of light (including red and yellow) more effectively, while scattering and reflecting shorter blue ones back to our eyes. This effect is enhanced by the deep penetration and lack of air bubbles found in glaciers and icebergs. On the other hand, smaller pieces of ice or snow look white because air bubbles in them scatter all colours. Deep, compressed ice lacks these bubbles, allowing these blue hues to dazzle our eyes.

I always enjoy a colour challenge and Terri’s Sunday Stills one this week gives me a great excuse to bring together a selection of glacier and iceberg shots from our trip to Svalbard last year. You may well have seen some of these previously in my day-to-day travel accounts of that trip, but I believe some are as yet unshared. Of those that I shared previously several are new edits, more tightly cropped to emphasise the iciness. And pulling them into a single gallery I think will emphasise the impact these icy scenes had on me.

Click on any image in the gallery to find out where they were taken. All are in Svalbard but are of various glaciers and fjords. Note that ‘breen’ means glacier, ‘bukta’ is a bay and ‘fjorden’ is of course a fjord.

I visited Svalbard in August 2025

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