The 12 Best Places to See Glaciers, Ice, and Polar Wonders

Rivers of ancient ice, the lagoons and fjords they carve, and the frozen ends of the Earth. These are the atlas’s glaciers, fjords, and polar wonders — some of the most fragile places on the list, and among the most moving to stand before.

Antarctic Peninsula

Antarctic Peninsula

The most accessible edge of the frozen continent — a realm of blue icebergs, glacier-hung mountains, and vast penguin colonies, where wildlife thrives amid staggering polar scenery.

Polar & ice Antarctica & the Poles

Geirangerfjord

Sunnmøre, Western Norway

One of the world's most celebrated fjords — a deep, narrow arm of the sea winding between sheer 1,000-metre cliffs laced with waterfalls like the Seven Sisters, with abandoned farms clinging to impossible ledges.

Fjord Europe

Ilulissat Icefjord

Ilulissat, western Greenland

A fjord choked with colossal icebergs calved from one of the fastest, most productive glaciers on Earth — a roaring, ever-changing cathedral of ice on Greenland's Arctic coast.

Glacier North America

Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon

Vatnajökull National Park, Southeast Iceland

A glacial lagoon where huge icebergs calved from the Vatnajökull ice cap drift in still, deep water before floating out to sea — and wash up as glittering shards on the black-sand 'Diamond Beach'.

Glacier Europe

Karakoram & Baltoro Glacier

Gilgit-Baltistan, northern Pakistan

The greatest concentration of high peaks on Earth — a 62-kilometre river of ice leading to K2 and a ring of granite towers, in the most extreme mountain terrain anywhere.

Glacier South Asia

Milford Sound

Fiordland National Park, South Island, New Zealand

New Zealand's most famous fjord — sheer cliffs and the pyramid of Mitre Peak rising straight from dark water, laced with waterfalls fed by some of the highest rainfall on Earth, in the heart of Fiordland.

Fjord Oceania

South Georgia

South Georgia, South Atlantic

A remote, mountainous sub-Antarctic island where glaciers meet the sea and beaches heave with hundreds of thousands of king penguins and elephant seals — one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on Earth.

Polar & ice Antarctica & the Poles

Svalbard

Svalbard archipelago, Arctic Ocean

A High Arctic archipelago of glaciers, jagged peaks, and frozen fjords roughly midway between Norway and the North Pole — the realm of the polar bear, under months of midnight sun and polar night.

Polar & ice Europe

Vatnajökull Ice Caves

Southeast Iceland

Glowing blue caves melted into the heart of Europe's largest ice cap — crystalline chambers of glacier ice, formed anew each winter beneath a vast frozen dome that hides fire below.

Glacier Europe

Aletsch Glacier

Valais, Switzerland

The largest glacier in the Alps — a 20-kilometre river of ice up to 900 metres thick, curving between 4,000-metre peaks in a vast frozen highway.

Glacier Europe

Columbia Icefield

Alberta & British Columbia, Canada

The largest icefield in the Rocky Mountains — a vast frozen plateau feeding glaciers that flow toward three different oceans, reached along one of the world's great mountain highways.

Glacier North America

Perito Moreno Glacier

Los Glaciares National Park, Santa Cruz, Argentina

A vast, active glacier in Argentine Patagonia whose towering blue ice face calves thunderously into a lake — one of the few large glaciers on Earth that has stayed roughly in balance rather than sharply retreating.

Glacier Latin America