Qualla: Southern Patagonian Ice Field

Southern Patagonian Ice Field: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the window of a high-flying aircraft, it looks like a tear in the map: a vast white expanse where the green of southern Chile and the brown of the Argentine steppe simply stop. The Southern Patagonian Ice Field is the largest contiguous mass of ice on Earth outside the polar regions — roughly 16,480 square kilometers of glacier sprawling for some 350 kilometers along the spine of the Andes. It is a survivor, the larger of two surviving fragments of the great Patagonian Ice Sheet that once buried all of southern Chile during the last Ice Age. Stand at its edge and you are looking at deep time made visible, the cold heart of a continent's southern tip.

Southern Patagonian Ice Field: A Factory of Glaciers

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The ice field does not sit still — it bleeds outward in every direction, feeding dozens of glaciers that grind down toward the sea on both sides of the divide. To the west, rivers of ice tumble into the labyrinth of Pacific fjords. To the east, they spill into the great Patagonia...

Southern Patagonian Ice Field: The Glacier That Defies the Rule

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The most famous of its children is the Perito Moreno, in Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park, and it is famous for breaking the rules. While glaciers across Patagonia and most of the world are retreating in a warming climate, Perito Moreno is one of only a handful still holdi...

Southern Patagonian Ice Field: Fire Beneath the Ice

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For all its frozen stillness, the ice field hides fire. Two volcanoes lie buried beneath the plateau — Lautaro and Viedma — among the least studied volcanoes in either Chile or Argentina, simply because reaching them means crossing some of the most hostile terrain on Earth. The i...

Southern Patagonian Ice Field: Crossed Only Once, Then Left Alone

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Humans have only ever scratched at the edges of this place. Serious exploration came late — expeditions led by Federico Reichert before the First World War, by Alberto de Agostini in the 1930s, by Eric Shipton in the early 1960s. From the air, the German aviator Gunther Plüschow ...