Glacier Day and World Water Day: why Perito Moreno matters more than ever
The glacier is one hundred percent water
The human body is only sixty percent water. Blood is ninety, muscles seventy-five, the brain almost the same. A glacier is one hundred percent water: snow fallen over hundreds of years, compressed until it becomes translucent blue ice. An open-air mineral that doesn't need anyone to mine it, that requires neither a concession nor extraction.
The ice wall of Perito Moreno rises seventy meters above the water — roughly the height of Buenos Aires' Obelisk — with a submerged mass beneath the surface of Lago Argentino that is much larger. Three kilometers wide and 250 square kilometers in area, larger than the entire city of Buenos Aires. When we stand on the walkways and a chunk of that ice breaks off and crashes into the lake, we feel even smaller.
The Southern Patagonian Ice Field, of which Perito Moreno is just one part, is the third largest freshwater reserve on the planet after the poles — and the only one of the three you can reach on foot. That's why we love taking people to experience it: to grasp its scale and feel its importance.
The Southern Patagonian Ice Field covers approximately 12,000 km² between Argentina and Chile. More than 48 glaciers originate from it, including Perito Moreno, Upsala, and Viedma. It is the largest continental ice field in the world outside the poles.
Two days, one conversation
March 21 is World Glacier Day. March 22 is World Water Day. The UN placed them side by side because they speak about the same thing: glaciers store around 70% of the planet's freshwater. More than two billion people depend on glacial meltwater as a water source. One in every four people on Earth.
It is estimated that one third of today's glaciers will have disappeared by 2050.
Perito Moreno on a melting planet
Most of the world's glaciers are retreating. Perito Moreno is not — or at least not at the same pace: it advances between one and two meters per day, loses mass at its lake front, and the net result is a stability that glaciologists continue to study. It is a scientific rarity and, for those of us who live here, also a stroke of luck.
The neighboring glaciers tell a different story. Upsala, the largest glacier in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field on the Argentine side, has retreated more than four kilometers in recent decades. Spegazzini, Onelli. Perito Moreno is the exception; the others are the norm.
The law that protects the ice
In 2010, Argentina enacted the National Glacier Law. It declares glaciers and permafrost public assets, prohibits extractive activities in glacial and periglacial zones, and creates the National Glacier Inventory as a monitoring tool. It is one of the most comprehensive glacier protection laws in the world.
For some years now there has been pressure to modify it. The argument is economic: mining investment, high-altitude areas, projects that the law blocks. The counterargument is simpler: the water those glaciers guarantee has no replacement. Water scarcity is already an ongoing crisis in several regions of the planet — not a future scenario.
From El Calafate, this is not an abstract debate. It is a discussion about the place where we live and work.
If you want to learn more about Law 26,639 and the changes being pushed, you can read our full article on Argentina's Glacier Law.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions about glaciers and freshwater
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