Mer de Glace

The Mer de Glace is a valley glacier located on the northern slopes of the Mont Blanc massif, in the French Alps. It is 7.5 km long and 200 meters 660 ft profound at the same time, when all its tributary icy masses are considered, it can be viewed as the longest and biggest ice sheet in France, and the second longest in the Alps after the Aletsch Glacier. In its strictest sense, the Mer de Glace can be considered as starting at a height of 2,100 meters 6,900 ft, only north of the Aiguille du Tacul, where it is shaped by the intersection of the Glacier de Leschaux and the Glacier du Tacul.

The Glacier du Tacul supplies substantially more ice than the Glacier de Leschaux. In the eighteenth and nineteenth hundreds of years the icy mass slid the distance down to the village of Les Bois, where it was known as Glacier des Bois. Around then the waterway Arveyron rose up out of the ice sheet under a cave like vault grotte d'Arveyron and, through the records of early journalists and pilgrims, pulled in numerous more guests, painters and later picture takers, for instance Joseph Mallord William Turner's "Wellspring of the Arveron in the Valley of Chamouni Savoy", 1816. The situation of its front end ied throughout the years yet its most extreme degree was in the mid-nineteenth century.