Perito Moreno Glacier

A massive glacier in Patagonia where towering ice walls regularly calve into Lake Argentino.

Its ice front is about 5 kilometres wide and rises on average 74 metres above the water of Lake Argentino. It lies 78 kilometres from El Calafate and is one of the most important tourist attractions in Argentine Patagonia. The glacier begins partly in Chile's Magallanes Region and is also part of Bernardo O'Higgins National Park.

How did it get its name?

In 1879 Juan Tomás Rogers of the Chilean navy was the first non-Indigenous person to sight it, and he called it Francisco Gormaz. Later the Argentine Rudolph Hauthal named it Bismarck. It was finally named after Francisco Moreno, an explorer who studied the region in the 19th century and helped defend Argentina's case in a border dispute with Chile. A boundary treaty signed in 1881 placed the glacier on the Argentine side, east of the Andes, where it empties into Lake Argentino.

A glacier that held steady

Ice calving, when huge chunks break off the front into the lake, can be seen here. For a long time Perito Moreno was one of the few glaciers that stayed roughly in balance during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, gaining ice at about the same rate that it lost it. Scientists still debate why. Since 2020 its northern front has been retreating, possibly because of climate change. The ice is about 170 metres deep.

On the globe

The model shows the glacier where towering ice walls regularly break off into Lake Argentino.