Amalia and El Brujo Glaciers

It’s hard for a glacier to stand out in a world of ice fields that enjoy almost celebrity status. But the three-kilometer-wide (two-mile-wide) Amalia Glacier on the Peel Fjord manages to, for its sheer beauty and its thick ice floes plunging into the sea. It also happens to be at the convenient point where the vast national parks of Bernardo O’Higgins, Torres del Paine and Argentina’s UNESCO-designated Los Glaciares converge.

So many grand fjords crisscross Chile’s southern Pacific coast that guiding a ship through the region is like trying to decide which highway off-ramp to take to your next destination. When weather allows, the two-kilometer-wide (one-mile-plus-wide) El Brujo Glacier at the back of Asia Fjord is a glorious wall of ice waiting to be discovered, with chunks the size of cars tumbling down hundreds of feet into the icy waters below.

The towering 60-kilometer-long (37-mile-long) Pío XI Glacier, also called Brüggen, is the granddaddy of all Patagonian glacial ice fields. Located in Bernardo O’Higgins National Park, the glacier takes a 90-degree turn on its way down to the sea and is almost twice as large as Singapore. Glaciologists are not entirely clear on why Pío XI is the rare glacier—along with Argentina’s nearby Perito Moreno at the base of the Torres del Paine cordillera—that is growing rather than receding.