Читать книгу Torres del Paine. Chile's Premier National Park and Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park онлайн

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In all 48 major outlet glaciers have been identified, together with a further 100 smaller cirque and valley glaciers. Most of the major glaciers either terminate in the sea (on the Chilean side), including the Jorge Montt, Pío XI and the Serrano, or in freshwater lakes such as those in Torres del Paine and Los Glaciares national parks. Only three of these glaciers are not retreating, the Pío XI, San Rafael and the Perito Moreno. Otherwise, the retreat of glaciers in the area has been exceptionally rapid, the Grey some 2.3km and the Tyndall some 1.6km over the past 22 years, and the O’Higgins retreating 14.6km and losing an area of over 50km2 in the period 1896 to 1995 – one of the largest glacial retreats of the 20th century. Almost all of the glaciers are calving (shedding huge chunks of ice from their snout), often in spectacular fashion, into adjacent lakes or fjords.

Glaciar Grey (Walks 1 and 2)

The Southern Patagonian Ice Field forms only one part of what was once the Patagonian Ice Sheet; the North Patagonian Ice Field (now contained within the area of Chile’s Laguna San Rafael national park) is the other, smaller, remaining portion. About 17,500–18,000 years ago, during the last glacial period (the Llanquihue glaciation, as it is called in Chile), the Patagonian Ice Sheet covered an area of some 480,000km2, stretching roughly as far north as Puerto Montt, and also extended across the Andes some distance into Argentina.