Glacier Lagoon

What you can do here

Touch the water

Tap the lagoon and a ring spreads out, flattened by the low angle, bending the reflections of the ice and the sky as it goes. Drag through it for a small wake.

Touch the ice

Tap the big floe in front and you hear it crack, while a fine line of light runs a short way through the ice. The block doesn’t break: ice under strain cracks inside first. It needs seven seconds before it will crack again.

Let the wind in

Turn up Wind and patches of ruffled water drift across the lagoon, blurring the reflections where they pass. Sailors call them cat’s paws. At Still, the water is a mirror broken only by a slow swell.

Ripples

Ripples sets how much the water moves along the ice and the shore, and how loud it laps.

Use it as your wallpaper

Press F for fullscreen and M to turn the sound off and on; the volume and your sound choice carry over to every wallpaper. The sound keeps playing if you switch to another tab.

Live link

On a computer desktop

Some wallpaper apps can show a web page behind your desktop icons. Give one the live link above and the scene runs there on its own: no page around it, no ads and no sound.

On a TV or a spare screen

Open this page and press F, or use Fullscreen. While it’s in fullscreen we ask the browser to keep the screen from going to sleep.

On a phone or tablet

Save image downloads exactly what’s on the screen as a picture. Set it as your wallpaper from your photos; the phone will crop the sides.

A live wallpaper keeps a page running all day. Through the live link the scene draws at most 30 frames a second and stops while the screen is covered, but on a laptop it still costs some battery.

Why glacier ice is blue

Glacier ice is old snow, pressed for years until most of its air is squeezed out. Dense ice like that absorbs a little red light over every inch it travels through, so after a few feet what comes back to you is blue. Ice with lots of trapped bubbles scatters light before it can be absorbed and looks white; the clearest, oldest pieces are the bluest.

Why the reflections only move near you

You see the lagoon at a low angle. Far off, a ripple covers less than a pixel and the water looks like glass; close by, the same ripple is large and tilts what it reflects. That’s why the floes and the glacier stay sharp in the distance while the water at your feet keeps moving.

About the sounds

Two recordings and one quiet layer: water moving along the ice, a single small crack, and soft wind over snow. The crack is a fine sound, not a split; it waits seven seconds between plays.

If you’d rather just watch

• Frozen Lake, an ice screensaver
• Aurora Camp, northern lights over a snowy tent