Our final glaciers

A blog post by Adam. Our final days in Patagonia were devoted to glaciers, which seems fitting because it was glaciers that formed the incredible valleys and peaks, and it is glaciers that continue to glisten in both Chile and Argentina.

On our third to last day we went to the Glacarium, a museum devoted to the slowly moving ice masses. There we learned how glaciers form and that the Southern Patagonia Ice Field (which feeds nearly all of the glaciers we saw) is the third largest reserve of fresh water on the planet, after Antarctica and Greenland. The museum also bombarded us with messages about climate change and the countless shrinking glaciers. The loss of glaciers in this small part of the world blew us away.

On our second to last day we visited Perito Moreno Glacier (which we also visited on our first day in Patagonia). We first viewed the glacier from a distance and then strapped on crampons and hiked across it. It was incredible. We trudged across ice that had first fallen as snow about 250 years ago, then compacted into ice, and finally started its slow journey down the mountain, carving a valley as it moved along. We came across streams, waterfalls, sink holes and countless crevasses during our 3 hour journey on the ice. It was like nothing we had seen before. And, as it turns out, it is like few other glaciers in the world because it is "stable". In other words, it is not getting smaller. In fact over the last hundred years the glacier has grown more than it has receded...

Perito Moreno Glacier

Our last full day, however, would show us just how unstable many other glaciers are. We caught a boat for 45 minutes, hiked for an hour, jumped on a Zodiak for 30 minutes and then hiked for an hour more until we arrived at an iceberg-filled lake with views of three massive glaciers. One of these glaciers, however, was far less massive than it had been just 80 years ago. In order to get to the iceberg lake we walked through a dry lake bed, a lake the glacier had once fed. Just 50 years ago, the entirety of the iceberg lake we now saw had been part of the glacier. In fact, the glacier had receded so much that the waters from the lake it now formed flowed into Chile and the Pacific Ocean, rather than into Argentina and the Atlantic, as had been the case until the mid twentieth century. For millennia the glacier had crested the continental divide, and then in the span of thirty years everything changed.

Icebergs on a lake that was under the glacier just 50 years ago.

One of our guides said that the glacier's shrinking was not due to climate change, but other factors. Still, climate change appears to have affected many of the glaciers, and it is unclear what might come of Patagonia's ubiquitous glaciers. Nevertheless, one thing is for sure. Patagonia is changing and in thirty years, or perhaps just fifteen, it will look different than it does today. The glaciers will likely be smaller and the tourists more abundant.

 

Which is what has made this experience, both in Patagonia and during the trip in general, so special. What we have seen will surely change in the coming decades. Quito is no longer the city I studied in during college, and in another 15 years Israel, the DR, Haiti, the Galapagos, and Argentina will likely also have changed. We too will probably change and so too will our perception of these places transform. And so, amidst the winds of global and personal changes, this trip will always stand as a wholly unique experience, not to be repeated, but surely to be forever savored.