Ice field

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An ice field (also called an icefield) is a flat land area (or a basin surrounded by mountains) covered by ice, usually formed by long periods of snow. Greenland and Antarctica possess continental sized icefields.

A typical but much smaller North American icefield is the Columbia Icefield, located in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, near the road between Banff, Alberta and Jasper. The Columbia Icefield, though one of the largest in the Rockies and despite its fame with tourists, is actually among the smaller icefields in the North American Cordillera.

The largest icefields in the same range of latitude are in the Pacific Ranges of the Coast Mountains, in a series of montane icecaps running northwest from Vancouver, British Columbia. There are six major ones worth naming:

Pemberton Icecap
Lillooet Crown Icecap
Homathko Icefield
Waddington Range
Monarch Icefield
Ha-Iltzuk Icefield (Silverthrone Icefield)

There are dozens of other icefields in the Pacific Ranges and their neighbouring region to the north, the Kitimat Ranges, most of which far exceed in size the Columbia Icefield. Even bigger than the Pacific Ranges group of icefields is the c. 6,500 km² Stikine Icecap, which straddles the British Columbia-Alaska boundary between the estuaries of Stikine and Taku Rivers. Northwest of it, beyond the Stikine, is the 2,500 km² Juneau Icefield, which spans the British Columbia-Alaska boundary inland from the old Alaska state capital of Juneau. Also on the British Columbia-Alaska boundary are a group of small icefields and glaciers which together form one huge glacial expanse from the Grand Plateau Glacier west of Mount Fairweather to the Kelsall River near the Chilkoot Pass. This group of glaciers, like those in the Waddington Range, do not have a collective name but constitute an identifiable contiguous ice-mass composed of many named streams. This mountainous icefield area is partly in Glacier Bay National Park and includes most icefield areas in that park. The British Columbia side of the border is as yet unprotected

The largest icefields in North America are still farther north. One of these is the Kluane Icecap which embraces the region of the Icefield Ranges spanning the southern Yukon-Alaska boundary and adjoining parts of British Columbia north of the Alsek River and which include most of the Saint Elias Mountains and Chugach Mountains. The southern endge of the Kluane Icecap overlooks Yakutat Bay. It includes the Malaspina Glacier, the Bagley Icefield and other well-known subareas, and extends as a single icemass west to the Copper include the much of the Chugach Mountains as well as nearly all of the Saint Elias Mountains. Another major icefield in Alaska surrounds Mount McKinley in Denali National Park. Others are to be found further east in the Alaska Ranges, all of them unnamed.

The only large icecaps in continental Europe are in Norway: Dovre and Jotunheimen, but these are much smaller than their British Columbian counterparts. There are a handful of small icefields, also, in the southern Andes Mountains, in New Zealand and in the Himalayas and Altay Mountains (the border range between the Central Asian Republics and China).

In South America, there are two main ice fields, Campo de Hielo Norte (Northern Ice Field or Northern Patagonian Ice Field) and Campo de Hielo Sur (Southern Ice Field or Southern Patagonian Ice Field), both in Chile (although there are parts of the Southern Ice Field in Argentina). There is also a small ice field in the islands west of Tierra del Fuego.

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