This water fell as snow in 1611.
Then it spent 415 years in snow, ice and stone before it reached the bottle. Follow one drop the whole way down.
It landed as a crystal, 3,420 metres up.
Six arms, no two alike, and nine parts air to one part water. On the upper basin it weighed almost nothing.
Forty winters pressed it into firn.
Snow fell on snow. The crystals lost their arms, the grains rounded and locked together, and the air was squeezed out. Glaciologists call this stage firn, from an old German word for “last year’s”. We named the water after it.
At 61 metres down, the air sealed shut.
The grains fused into glacier ice and trapped a few bubbles of the air of 1680 inside. From this point on, nothing else got in.
Then the glacier carried it 6.3 kilometres downhill. It took 315 years.
- 16870.1 kmNewton publishes the Principia.
- 17691.8 kmJames Watt patents his steam engine.
- 18593.6 kmDarwin publishes On the Origin of Species.
- 19034.5 kmThe first powered flight, at Kitty Hawk.
- 19695.8 kmTwo people walk on the Moon.
- 19956.3 kmIt reaches the end of the ice.
Glacier and timeline are illustrative. The historical dates are real.
1995. It reached the edge of the ice and let go.
A summer melt freed it as liquid for the first time in 384 years.
Thirty-one years through stone.
The meltwater sank into fractured granite under the moraine and crept through it a few metres a year. The rock filtered it slowly and left behind a light, exact mineral profile.
| Limestone band | |
|---|---|
| Bicarbonate | 38.0 |
| Calcium | 11.2 |
| Granite | |
| Silica | 6.8 |
| Sodium | 1.4 |
| Potassium | 0.6 |
| Dolomite | |
| Sulphate | 4.1 |
| Magnesium | 1.9 |
| Dissolved solids | 64 |
| pH | 7.6 |
Illustrative analysis for a fictional brand.
It rises at 4.6 °C, every day of the year.
The spring sits under a stand of larch at 1,180 metres. We bottle within forty metres of it, in glass, on the day the water surfaces.
Move across the water.Touch the water.
Four centuries, by the case.
FIRN Still Glacier Water. Fell as snow in 1611, bottled at the spring in 2026.
Every bottle carries its year.
The batch code under the cap tells you when your water fell as snow.