The Perito Moreno glacier is located in the national park Los Glaciares, close to Calafate Argentina. The national park is a lot bigger than “just” this glacier and in our December blog you will be able to read about our other visits to another part of this national park. However the Perito Moreno glacier is so beautiful and impressive that it deserves its own article.
The glacier originates from the South Patagonia ice fields. The glacier isn’t the biggest one (258 km2) that originates from these ice fields but it is very easy to reach and see, you can practically drive up to it. You can also take boat tours to see this glacier from another angle. We didn’t do a boat tour but walked along the paths and platforms that have been build inside the park to admire this glacier. This glacier has been monitored since somewhere around the 1900’s and up until 2020 it had a relative stable size. However since 2020 this glacier too is suffering under the climate change. The glacier ends in the Argentino lake where it has an average height of 74m above the water. The total ice depth however is 170m. The glacier moves about 1 to 2 meters every day. The movement causes loud cracks and sometimes (big) pieces fall off. In the past, in winter time the glacier would sometimes grow so much it would close off the body of water in front of it, but this hasn’t happened since 2012. We thoroughly enjoyed our visit and spend about three hours admiring it. We have been close to a few glaciers in Europe, but none were this impressive. We took no less than 260 photo’s of this glacier, here’s a selection of the best ones, enjoy!
We don’t have the best equipment to capture the beauty and “blueness” of this glacier. With these four photo’s we used our binoculars.
Pieces of ice that have broken off, float around further down in the lake.
