A casual glance at the landscape of Patagonia will tell you it’s stunning. There are more types of birds than I’ve ever seen. There are wild llamas, giant cats, staggering mountains, raging rivers, and there's some of the most capricious weather in the world. Impressive? Yes. However, the most extraordinary element of the landscape is that it is chock full of glaciers. It seemed as though every mountain had a glacier perched on top, and around every corner there was a glacier waiting. Despite growing up in a Minnesota family that spent considerable time on the ice in the winter, Patagonia still has more ice than I’ve ever seen. (For more on the vulnerable rivers that run from the glaciers of Patagonia, check out George Black's series here on OnEarth.)
A perfect example is Argentina’s Los Glaciares National Park. Compared to the whole of Patagonia it’s a relatively small area -- only covering 4,459 square kilometers out the total of 800,000 square kilometers that make up all of Patagonia -- but within its borders there are over 200 glaciers. Patagonia, as a whole, is home to the third largest mass of continental ice outside of Antarctica and Greenland, a total that is spread between two main ice fields that contain more than 20,000 square kilometers of glacial ice (for those of us that are metric impaired that’s 7,722 square miles). If you do the math this equates to a stunning 2.5 percent of the entire area of Patagonia. An impressive number that still fails to completely sum up how much ice this is (look to the left). To put it simply, there is so much ice in Patagonia that it is a factor in the constantly changing weather the area is so famous for.
We’ve been lucky enough to view the glaciers of Patagonia from a number of different vantage points. Sitting above them watching them calve into massive glacial lakes, hiking up to the face of them and touching them, looking across the mountains to see them at eye level, getting on a boat to get a different perspective, and, as was most common, staring at them on top of some mountain from the floor of a valley. It’s made me wonder how things that are so immovable, massive, and old, can be as fragile as they are? You would think that ice that weighs enough to depress the earths crust enough that there are earthquakes as the crust begins to push up when it melts would be more resilient. Unfortunately, they‘re not. Glaciers are some of the first and most visible victims of global warming.
The glaciers of Patagonia are no exception. A quick look at glacier photos, past and present, and you quickly realize how much they’ve been impacted over the past 40 years or so. The photos are incredibly sad; seeing the same notch in a cliff with the glacier almost covering it up, and then a current photo, it makes you wonder how it was possible for the glacier to ever reach that far down. However, I love seeing these photos because they provide a means to visually comprehend how profound the changes are that have happened over the decades.
The photos also make me wonder how anyone can argue against the existence of global warming. I’d like to believe that if decision makers were to actually go see these rivers of ice and spend some time around them they would be more inclined to do something to stop them from vanishing. For me, this concern is primarily about doing something to preserve the natural beauty they hold, but I recognize it doesn’t compare to the much more valid concern many communities have about their main source of fresh water disappearing.
I know the argument against using glacial loss as proof of global warming is that glaciers are complex systems and their growth and shrinkage is dependent on more than just temperature. Some would also argue we’re naturally coming to the end of an ice age and that the melting is normal. Both are potentially valid arguments, but I find the rate at which they are disappearing to be alarming. We should be doing as much as possible to make sure as little, if any, warming is caused by humans.
While the glaciers of Patagonia may no longer have the same size and grandeur of even 40 years ago, they still rank as one of the most impressive things we have ever seen in our lives. The only sad part is, more than likely, they are only going to continue to shrink. It’s hard to say how much longer they are going to be around. Long enough for us to make a return visit? Long enough for our kids to visit and be awestruck by them? Long enough for our grandkids? All I can say is we feel incredibly fortunate we were able to see the glaciers of Patagonia when we did.
Photos: Ben and Devon West. Aerial mosaic: NASA Earth Observatory
