Michael Wilkins
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Photograph of a small vivid turquoise glacial lake sitting in a basin of dark broken rock, surrounded by heavily snow-covered peaks under a pale blue sky.

Meltwater

Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand · September 2020

1D X Mark II, 35 millimetres, f 11, 1/250 of a second, ISO 100

That colour is rock flour. It is not doing anything clever.

Glacial meltwater sitting in a rock basin below the snowfields. The colour is rock flour — glaciers grind the bedrock to powder so fine it stays suspended and scatters light back as that specific turquoise. Shot from above so the lake reads as a shape dropped into the dark moraine rather than as a body of water with a shoreline.

Part of The Southern Alps, a series.