For the crew onboard the International Space Station daylight views of the Earth’s Southern Hemisphere offer fewer opportunities to observe and document land features with onboard cameras. However, South America’s Patagonian Ice Fields and glaciers in the far southern Andes mountains offer beautiful, dynamic features with frequent passes whenever weather conditions permit. On the afternoon of January 3, 2004, the crew took this view of the Upsala Glacier in Argentina. A worldwide retreat of glaciers was observed during the twentieth century and most of the Patagonia’s glaciers, including Upsala, were no exception.
Published Feb 2, 2004
Ice loss in Patagonia has struck more than just the largest and most frequently studied ice fields.
Published Feb 23, 2016
The glaciers of Patagonia are some of the fastest and most erosive on Earth.
Published Jul 14, 2017
This astronaut photograph shows the merged outlet of two glaciers within the deep fjords of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field.
Published Oct 5, 2009
The weather can often be fierce, but clouds cooperated for this expansive space-based view of the icefield.
Published Jun 28, 2017
The icefields of Patagonia, located at the southern end of South America, are the largest masses of ice in the temperate Southern Hemisphere (approximately 55,000 square kilometers).
Published May 8, 2006
A piedmont-type glacier fans out across a plain in northeast Greenland.
Published Feb 20, 2015
The looping medial moraines on Tajikistan’s Bivachny glacier offer a clue of periods when it surged rapidly forward.
Published Mar 17, 2015
More than 30 years of ice velocity data are helping scientists tease out how mountain glaciers respond to climate change.
Published Sep 11, 2019
The glacier atop Iceland’s Ok volcano was declared dead in 2014. Satellite images show the latter stages of its decline.
Published Aug 9, 2019
Straddling the southern Andes Mountains in Chile and Argentina, these glaciers have thinned significantly in the past four decades.
Published Mar 3, 2014
Acquired June 5, 2011, this natural-color image shows Roze Glacier on the coast of Novaya Zemlya, Russia.
Published Sep 18, 2011
The HPS-12 glacier in Chile has lost about half of its length in three decades.
Published Jan 25, 2018
Natural processes and human-caused warming have combined to bring rapid change to a glacier in southeastern Alaska.
Published Aug 20, 2014
Acquired September 6, 2010, this natural-color image shows chunks of ice breaking off Matusevich Glacier along the coast of Antarctica.
Published Nov 7, 2010
An outlet glacier in the Russian High Arctic has scientists rethinking how rapidly glaciers in cold, dry areas can move.
Published Apr 8, 2019
The Southern Patagonian Icefield of Chile and Argentina hosts several spectacular glaciers—including Grey Glacier located in the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. This glacier, which in 1996 had a measured total area of 270 square kilometers and a length of 28 kilometers (104 square miles in area, 17 miles long), begins in the Patagonian Andes Mountains to the west and terminates in three distinct lobes into Grey Lake (upper image).
Published Jun 25, 2007
The first global catalog of glaciers is helping scientists get a better handle on how much sea levels could rise in coming years.
Published Jun 26, 2014
At the end of May, many square kilometers of ice crumbled from Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier, continuing a century-long retreat.
Published Jun 11, 2014
The retreat of one of Austria’s largest glaciers has stranded some of its tributaries, now classified as separate glaciers.
Published Jul 3, 2015
The Tracy and Heilprin Glaciers may not be Greenland’s largest, but they are retreating fast.
Published Apr 8, 2018
To understand how fast-moving glaciers are changing the ice sheets, scientists devised a method to map elevation change using data from ICESat.
Published Oct 3, 2009
The glaciers in the Kerguelen Islands are shrinking as snowfall declines.
Published Apr 27, 2018
Acquired January 11, 2005 and January 4, 2009, these images show retreat in the Neumayer Glacier on South Georgia Island.
Published Aug 1, 2010
