page_title: Southern Patagonian Ice Field
section_title: See also
hierarchical_section_title: Southern Patagonian Ice Field / See also
caption_attribution_description: English: This grand panorama of the Southern Patagonia Ice Field was photographed by a crew member aboard the International Space Station (ISS) on a rare clear day in the southern Andes Mountains. With an area of 13,000 square kilometers (5,000 square miles), the ice field is the largest temperate ice sheet in the Southern Hemisphere. Storms that swirl into the region from the southern Pacific Ocean bring rain and snow (between 2 to 11 meters of rainfall per year), resulting in the buildup of the ice sheet. During the ice ages, these glaciers were far larger. Geologists now know that ice tongues extended far onto the plains in the foreground, completely filling the great Patagonian lakes on repeated occasions. Similarly, ice tongues extended into the dense network of fjords on the Pacific side of the ice field. Ice tongues today appear tiny compared what an “ice age” astronaut would have seen.
context_page_description: The Southern Patagonian Ice Field, located at the Southern Patagonic Andes between Chile and Argentina, is the world's second largest contiguous extrapolar ice field. It is the bigger of two remnant parts of the Patagonian Ice Sheet, which covered all of southern Chile during the last glacial period, locally called the Llanquihue glaciation.
context_section_description: Northern Patagonian Ice Field
  List of glaciers
  Argentina-Chile relations
  Laguna del Desierto incident
  Beagle conflict
  Puna de Atacama dispute
  Glaciarium (museum)
caption: Southern Patagonia Ice Field from ISS, astronaut photo. North is to the right.
exif: {"Image Copyright": "945_7039.NEF"}