Ice & Snow Colors

Here's an article on Greenland that explains why ice looks like it does:

"About 50 feet of snow depth is required to pack the snow into typical glacial ice. That ice is white because it is full of air bubbles and crystal boundaries which scatter the light — what a physicist like me would call Mie scattering.

It’s the same phenomenon that makes milk or clouds white.

Non-fat milk is much less opaque than full-fat milk or cream and has a bluish tinge. This is a different kind of scattering, called Rayleigh scattering, and is why the sky is blue, and why deep water is blue. The difference between Rayleigh and Mie scattering is the size of the particles.

Once a meltwater lake starts it tends to get deeper because it absorbs sunlight more than the surrounding ice. It is intensely blue from Rayleigh scattering."