English: Detailed images provide a closer look at some of the icefield’s largest, most notable glaciers. Jorge Montt, located on the north end of the South Patagonian Icefield, flows south to north and empties into a fjord that ultimately angles west toward the Pacific Ocean. Since the mid 1980s, the speed of ice flow has fluctuated, with particularly spectacular retreat events documented in the 1990s. In all, the glacier retreated 13 kilometers between 1984 and 2014.

In this image above, you can clearly see the glacier’s former extent in the 1980s, visible as the tan-gray area devoid of vegetation around the ice. This glacier has thinned and retreated so fast that vegetation has not yet had a chance to fill in. During peak retreat, the glacier was thinning vertically at a rate of 31 meters (100 feet) per year.

“When we flew over this glacier in 2014 to survey its thickness,” Rignot recalled, “the airplane was at an altitude that would have put us inside the glacier in the 1980s.”