Glaciers can be found on every continent in the world – if you include Oceania, where they exist in New Zealand and Western New Guinea.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center estimates that the world’s glaciers have a total area of approximately 270,000 square miles (700,000 square kilometres).
So which glacier is the largest in the world – and where is it?
Well, that depends on what you count as a glacier and how you measure it.
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What’s the world’s largest glacier system?
The world’s largest glacier system (and the world’s longest glacier) can be found in Antarctica: the Lambert Glacier-Amery ice shelf system.
This glacier is also an ice stream – part of an ice sheet that moves faster than the surrounding ice.
According to NASA, most of the Lambert Glacier moves at velocities between 400-800 metres (1,310-2,620 feet) per year. It flows from the Antarctic ice sheet to the Amery ice shelf (an inlet in East Antarctica), where it meets the sea.
As the glacier extends onto the ice shelf, it can reach velocities of 1,000-1,200 metres (3,280-3,937 feet) per year.
This means that the Guinness World Records (GWR) regards it as part of the Lambert Glacier-Amery ice shelf system. The glacier itself is over 270 miles (435 kilometres) long, but the longest flow-line from the drainage divide inland to the edge of the Amery ice shelf is roughly 913 miles (1,470 kilometres).
GWR states that the total area of the Lambert Glacier-Amery ice shelf system is ‘600,000 square miles (1,550,000 km2)’ – that's roughly twice the size of Texas. It's thought to reach up to 1,950 metres deep in places.
This ice shelf system was discovered by an Australian aircraft crew in 1956/57, in what is Australian Antarctic Territory.
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What’s the world’s largest single glacier?
But if you go by the area of a single glacier, Seller Glacier (also found in the Antarctic) is the winner. It measures 2,700 square miles (7,000 square kilometres). This makes it slightly larger than the US state of Delaware – or slightly smaller than the island of Crete in Greece.
The Seller Glacier is in the western Antarctica Peninsula, an outcrop of land below Chilean Antarctica and the Falkland Islands.
It was first surveyed by the British Graham Land Expedition in 1936–37.
Runners up Thurston Glacier No. 1 and Alexander Island Glacier No. 1 are also located in the Antarctic. As the continent holds the record for the coldest recorded temperature on Earth, though, it’s hardly surprising that you’ll also find vast swathes of icy glaciers there.
Top image: an Icelandic glacier. Credit: Getty
