Alaska Glacier Tours, Cruises, Railroad Riding

Pebbles of ice tumble from frigid blue spires, showering the silty water below. With a boom and a thundering crash, chunks shear from the wall of ice, sending sprays of water hundreds of feet into the air.

It’s a dramatic display—one that’s sure to impress visitors of any age. But Alaska’s booming, crashing glaciers also tell a compelling tale of climatic change. For families focused on environmental awareness, a tour of Alaskan glaciers makes for a fun-filled educational adventure.

Ice on the move

More than 100,000 glaciers creep and crawl along the mountains of Alaska. Most of them are retreating, which means that they’re losing more ice to melting and calving than they gain through the build-up of seasonal snowfall. Scientists are divided about whether the current trend of glacial retreat is due to excessive carbon emissions or whether it’s the tail end of a hundred-year cycle of glacial coming and going.

Glacial ice is a far cry from the frozen water in your freezer trays. If you were to drop a cube of ice from a glacier’s core into your drink, the pressure released would shatter the glass. The ice is so dense that it reflects only blue light, giving glaciers their haunting azure hue.

The transformation from snowflake to glacial ice takes nine years, and 30 feet of snow must fall to yield one square inch of glacier. Glaciers carve an incredible path through the landscape, dropping rocks, shaping lakes and shedding silt. The best way to grasp this phenomenon is to see it firsthand, with a tour of Alaska’s most accessible glaciers.

• Cruise passengers admire the Columbia Glacier.
• Ernst Schneider

Facing the glaciers near Anchorage

If you’re pressed for time, you can easily find an impressive glacier experience within a few hours of Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city and the jumping-off point for most Alaskan adventures.

An hour’s drive to the south is the Begich, Boggs Visitor Center, built on the remnants of a terminal moraine left by Portage Glacier. This is a fast-moving glacier that has receded 25 to 30 feet each year since 1914, forming a lake 800 feet deep as it retreats. In fact, Portage has pulled back so far that you must take a boat to approach its face, but it’s an easy and informative one-hour ride from the center.

Begich, Boggs offers hourly screenings of the award-winning film Voices From the Ice, and on Fridays, you can join rangers on an Ice Worm Safari to search for these tiny cousins of the earthworm that live only on glacial ice.

Another great glacier-viewing option is the 26 Glacier Cruise out of Whittier. Whittier is a 90-minute drive from Anchorage, including a spin through the longest highway-access tunnel in North America. Alternatively, you can opt for a rail/cruise package, which entails a scenic Alaska Railroad ride to and from your cruise ship.

Once aboard the 300-passenger catamaran, you’ll sail into some of the most beautiful fjords in Prince William Sound to get up close and personal with calving glaciers. There’s also a good chance of spotting whales, sea otters and sea lions swimming in the open water or bobbing around the icebergs in the bay. There’s a no-seasickness guarantee on this trip, and the all-female crew is a great reminder that girls can be captains, too.