The Most Beautiful Glaciers in the World
18 places in 11 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful glaciers in the world are Aletsch Glacier (Switzerland), Baltoro Glacier (Pakistan) and Greenland ice sheet (Greenland). The list covers 18 glaciers in 11 countries. Iceland has the most, with 4. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Glaciers are rivers of ice that move, crack and groan. Snow compressed over centuries turns into dense ice that flows downhill under its own weight, grinding valleys into broad U-shapes, carrying boulders the size of houses and breaking off into the sea in towers that fall with a roar. The great ones combine scale with colour, from the deep blue of old ice squeezed free of air to the dark stripes of moraine running down their length, and with a sense of time: the ice at a glacier's snout may have fallen as snow long before anyone now alive was born.
Baltoro in the Karakoram leads to Concordia, the junction of glaciers where K2 and several other great peaks rise around a single amphitheatre. Franz Josef in New Zealand descends towards temperate rainforest near the Tasman Sea. Aletsch is the largest glacier in the Alps, a long curve of ice below the Jungfrau, and Mer de Glace is the longest glacier in France. Perito Moreno in Argentine Patagonia ends in a wall of ice above Lago Argentino, while Jakobshavn, or Sermeq Kujalleq, in Greenland is among the fastest-moving glaciers on Earth and feeds the icebergs of the Ilulissat Icefjord.
The glaciers in this collection were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a place on the map, and the section can also be browsed by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aletsch Glacier | Glacier | Switzerland | ✓ |
| 2 | Baltoro Glacier | Glacier | Pakistan | |
| 3 | Greenland ice sheet | Glacier | Greenland | |
| 4 | Franz Josef Glacier | Glacier | New Zealand | |
| 5 | Vatnajökull | Glacier | Iceland | |
| 6 | Hubbard Glacier | Glacier | United States | |
| 7 | Snæfellsjökull | Volcano | Iceland | |
| 8 | Perito Moreno Glacier | Glacier | Argentina | |
| 9 | Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq) | Glacier | Greenland | |
| 10 | Vanjyakh (Fedchenko) Glacier | Glacier | Tajikistan | |
| 11 | Mer de Glace | Glacier | France | |
| 12 | Margerie Glacier | Glacier | United States | |
| 13 | Öræfajökull | Volcano | Iceland | |
| 14 | Torfajökull | Volcano | Iceland | |
| 15 | San Rafael Glacier | Glacier | Chile | |
| 16 | Eqi Glacier | Glacier | Greenland | |
| 17 | Cascada de Ventisquero Colgante | Glacier | Chile | |
| 18 | Midui Glacier | Glacier | People's Republic of China |
01 Aletsch Glacier
Aletschgletscher
Switzerland46.442° N 8.077° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Christian David · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Great Aletsch Glacier is the largest glacier in the Alps: about 23 km long, covering some 80 square kilometres, and holding around 15 cubic kilometres of ice. It is born at Konkordiaplatz, a wide basin high in the Bernese Alps where four ice streams meet, fed from the flanks of the Jungfrau, the Mönch, the Fiescherhorn and the Aletschhorn. Here the ice is more than 900 metres thick. From Konkordiaplatz the glacier flows south-east at around 180 metres a year, then bends in a long curve towards the Rhône valley, before ending far below the tree line in the gorge of the Massa river.
Did you know? In 1678 the villagers of Fiesch and Fieschertal vowed to pray against the advancing glacier; in 2010 the Vatican approved changing the prayer to ask for its survival.
02 Baltoro Glacier
Pakistan35.736° N 76.381° E
Guilhem Vellut from Paris · CC BY-SA 2.0 The Baltoro is the great highway of ice into the heart of the Karakoram. About 63 kilometres long and draining a basin of some 1,500 square kilometres in Gilgit-Baltistan, it is one of the longest glaciers outside the polar regions, a broad, rubble-covered river of ice set in a trough with walls scored by the ice. For most of its length the surface is a grey chaos of moraine, meltwater streams and ice towers; only higher up does it turn white. Its snout feeds the Braldu river, which flows on to join the Indus system.
Did you know? Concordia got its name in 1902 from Aleister Crowley, during the Eckenstein–Crowley attempt on K2, after the Konkordiaplatz glacier junction in the Swiss Alps.
03 Greenland ice sheet
Greenland76.700° N 41.200° W
Chmee2 / Valtameri · CC BY 3.0 Numbers struggle to do this thing justice. It covers about 80 percent of the world's largest island, stretches roughly 2,220 km from north to south, and holds an average of 1,500 meters of ice on top of the bedrock — in places, over 3 kilometers of it stacked up. Melt every bit of it and global sea level rises by something like 7.4 meters; together with Antarctica, it locks up more than two-thirds of all the fresh water on Earth.
Did you know? On 22 December 1991 a weather station near the summit recorded −69.6 °C, the coldest temperature ever measured in the Northern Hemisphere, though nobody noticed until 2020.
04 Franz Josef Glacier
New Zealand43.475° S 170.200° E
Image by RobO100 from Pixabay Few glaciers anywhere come down as far or as fast as Franz Josef. It begins in a snowfield of about twenty square kilometres, more than 2,500 metres up in the Southern Alps and over 300 metres deep, and in just eleven kilometres it drops to about 300 metres above sea level, into a valley lined with temperate rainforest. That is the strange picture it offers: blue-white ice between green walls of rainforest, its snout less than twenty kilometres from the Tasman Sea. The glacier is about twelve kilometres long and up to 300 metres thick, and the Waiho River pours grey with rock flour from its snout.
Did you know? Geologist Julius von Haast named the glacier in 1865 after Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria.
05 Vatnajökull
Iceland64.400° N 16.800° W
Image by photovicky from Pixabay Vatnajökull is the great ice cap of south-east Iceland and the largest glacier in Europe outside the Arctic, covering more than 7,000 square kilometres. The ice averages around 380 metres thick and reaches about 950 metres at its deepest, holding some 3,000 cubic kilometres of water. From its dome some thirty outlet glaciers pour down between the mountains towards the lowlands, among them Breiðamerkurjökull, Skaftafellsjökull and Fláajökull.
Did you know? In 1362 Öræfajökull, on the ice cap's southern rim, blasted out about 10 cubic kilometres of tephra, an eruption on the scale of Pinatubo in 1991.
06 Hubbard Glacier
United States60.314° N 139.371° W
Image by spalla67 from Pixabay Hubbard Glacier is the largest tidewater glacier in North America, a river of ice about 122 km long that begins high in the Saint Elias Mountains of Canada's Yukon and ends in a wall of ice facing the sea in Alaska. Its main source lies at around 3,400 metres near Mount Walsh, and one of its tributaries starts on the easternmost summit of Mount Logan, Canada's highest mountain. The ice moves so slowly over that distance that it takes roughly four centuries to travel from the head of the glacier to the sea, so the ice that breaks off today fell as snow centuries ago. In the Tlingit language the glacier is Sít' Tlein; its English name honours Gardiner Greene Hubbard.
Did you know? Hubbard has been advancing ever since its front was first mapped in 1895, while most glaciers in Alaska and around the world are thinning and retreating.
07 Snæfellsjökull
Iceland64.807° N 23.776° W
Anjali Kiggal · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the far western tip of the Snæfellsnes peninsula, a single cone of ice-capped rock rises to 1,446 metres straight from the sea. Snæfellsjökull is a stratovolcano some 700,000 years old, and its symmetry is what makes it unforgettable: a white dome that hangs over lava fields, black beaches and fishing hamlets, and on clear days shows itself across Faxaflói bay to Reykjavík, about 120 km away, like a cloud that refuses to move.
08 Perito Moreno Glacier
Glaciar Perito Moreno
Argentina50.493° S 73.128° W
Image by Barescar90 from Pixabay While roughly ninety percent of the world's glaciers are shrinking, Perito Moreno spent most of the twentieth century doing something almost nobody's glacier does: holding its ground, even pushing forward by a couple of meters some days, fed by heavy Andean snowfall high on the Southern Patagonian Ice Field and kept in balance by constant, thunderous calving into the lake below.
Did you know? The glacier is named after Francisco Moreno, a 19th-century Argentine explorer who studied the region.
09 Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq)
Greenland69.983° N 50.117° W
Giles Laurent · CC BY-SA 4.0 Sermeq Kujalleq — "the southern glacier" in Greenlandic, Jakobshavn in Danish — is the fastest-moving large glacier known. Where it leaves the Greenland ice sheet and enters its fjord, the ice has been clocked at more than 45 metres a day on annual average, faster still in summer. It drains around 6.5 per cent of the whole ice sheet and sends some 35 billion tonnes of ice into the sea every year, perhaps a tenth of all Greenland's icebergs. Few places on earth show the movement of ice so plainly.
Did you know? Its largest calving events set off glacial earthquakes that seismographs around the world detect, some exceeding magnitude 5.
10 Vanjyakh (Fedchenko) Glacier
Tajikistan38.767° N 72.283° E
Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit , Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center · Public domain The Vanjyakh Glacier, long known to the world as the Fedchenko Glacier, is the longest glacier on Earth outside the polar regions. It runs as a broad, nearly straight river of ice for about 77 km through the heart of the Pamirs in Tajikistan, covers some 700 square kilometres, and in places is close to a kilometre thick. Together with its dozens of tributaries it is estimated to hold around 144 cubic kilometres of ice, roughly a third of the volume of Lake Erie. Long dark ribbons of moraine run down its surface, marking where tributary glaciers have joined the main stream.
Did you know? Between 1910 and 1913 the glacier surged forward by 800 to 1,000 m, and the following year it dammed the Balyandkiik river.
11 Mer de Glace
France · 35.5 km from Aosta45.916° N 6.937° E
Image by Simon from Pixabay The Mer de Glace, the "sea of ice", is a river of ice about 7 km long, or some 12 km if its feeder glaciers are counted, flowing down the northern side of the Mont Blanc massif towards the Chamonix valley. Seen from the Montenvers terrace at 1,913 metres, it curves away between the granite spires of the Drus and the wall of the Grandes Jorasses, its surface ribbed and crevassed and darkened by rock debris.
Did you know? In the 17th century, as the glacier advanced toward homes in the valley, local people held processions and exorcisms to make it stop.
12 Margerie Glacier
United States58.968° N 137.176° W
Image by gwynethjones from Pixabay Margerie Glacier ends at the head of Tarr Inlet, in the far northwestern reach of Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, as a wall of ice about a mile wide and roughly 350 feet high, of which some 250 feet stand above the water. It flows about 21 miles from the southern slopes of Mount Root, a summit of nearly 13,000 feet in the Fairweather Range, and reaches the sea in a face of fractured towers and blue crevasses that seems almost too sheer to stand.
Did you know? When George Vancouver passed in 1794, Glacier Bay barely existed: a wall of ice about 20 miles wide and thousands of feet high filled its mouth.
13 Öræfajökull
Iceland64.025° N 16.642° W
Ferdinand Stöhr fellowferdi · CC0 Öræfajökull is the roof of Iceland. This ice-capped volcano rises straight from the narrow coastal plain at the southern tip of Vatnajökull, and on the rim of its summit caldera stands Hvannadalshnúkur, at about 2,110 metres the highest peak in the country. It is also Iceland's largest active volcano: a broad cone some 20 kilometres across, with an ice-filled caldera a few kilometres wide at the top and a fan of outlet glaciers, among them Svínafellsjökull, Skaftafellsjökull and Fjallsjökull, spilling down its flanks almost to the Ring Road.
Did you know? Hvannadalshnúkur, on the rim of Öræfajökull's caldera, is Iceland's highest peak at about 2,110 metres.
14 Torfajökull
Iceland63.894° N 19.010° W
Chmee2 / Valtameri · CC BY 3.0 Torfajökull is a volcano that hides in plain sight. Instead of a single cone, it is a vast caldera about 18 by 12 kilometres in Iceland's southern highlands, and inside it lies the largest expanse of rhyolite in the country. This pale, silica-rich rock weathers into hills of grey, brown, pink and green, streaked with yellow where sulphur seeps from the ground, and it gives the area around Landmannalaugar the painted look that has made it one of the best-loved landscapes in Iceland.
Did you know? Torfajökull's caldera, about 18 by 12 km, holds the largest area of rhyolite in Iceland.
15 San Rafael Glacier
Glaciar San Rafael
Chile46.700° S 73.833° W
Vincent Huang · CC BY 2.0 San Rafael Glacier is a great tongue of ice spilling west from the Northern Patagonian Ice Field in Chile's Aysén region, into the round lagoon of Laguna San Rafael. It is one of the main outlet glaciers of the ice field, covering more than 700 square kilometres from summits around 4,000 metres down to sea level, and it is often described as the tidewater glacier closest to the equator — remarkable at a latitude of about 46° south, roughly that of central France in the northern hemisphere.
Did you know? The lagoon is home to a resident group of leopard seals, an Antarctic species rarely settled this far north.
16 Eqi Glacier
Greenland69.817° N 50.067° W
David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada · CC BY 2.0 In De Quervain Bay, at the north-eastern end of the Ata Sund fjord north of Disko Bay, the Eqi Glacier, in Greenlandic Eqip Sermia, ends in a wall of ice more than three kilometres wide, rising between 50 and 170 metres above the water. It is one of the outlet glaciers through which the Greenland ice sheet drains into the sea, and it is unusually active: the ice at its front moves forward by as much as 16 metres a day, and the cliff sheds blocks of ice into the fjord again and again.
Did you know? Calving at Eqi can send waves up to about 3.3 metres high across the fjord, and the swell may keep running for close to an hour.
17 Cascada de Ventisquero Colgante
Chile44.437° S 72.504° W
LBM1948 · CC BY-SA 4.0 High above a rainforest valley in Chilean Patagonia, a tongue of ice hangs over the lip of a cliff, and from beneath it a band of meltwater drops in a single vertical plunge before sliding down a tilted shelf of bedrock. The Ventisquero Colgante, the "hanging glacier", and the falls it feeds are the emblem of Queulat National Park. Because the spot is remote and rarely measured, the height of the falls is uncertain: a cautious estimate is about 550 metres and it may be closer to 600, which would place it among the tallest waterfalls in South America. The falls average about 30 metres wide.
Did you know? The glacier's meltwater collects below in Laguna Témpanos, a lagoon of intense green colour at the foot of the cliff.
18 Midui Glacier
People's Republic of China29.454° N 96.507° E
Byronace · CC BY-SA 4.0 Two icefalls pour down from the snowfields of south-eastern Tibet and merge into a single tongue of ice that ends almost among the fields of a farming village. Midui Glacier lies in Bomi County, in the Nyingchi region, close to the Sichuan–Tibet Highway (China National Highway 318), east of the county town of Bomi. Between its two cascades of broken ice stands a strip of dense, untouched forest, and below the snout the valley opens onto the fields and houses of Midui village, so that glacier, woodland and farmland can be taken in from a single spot.
Did you know? Between 1995 and 2014 the tongue of Midui Glacier pulled back by about 300 metres, and the lake at its front grew as the ice withdrew.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful glacier in the world?
- On our list, Aletsch Glacier (Switzerland) ranks first, followed by Baltoro Glacier (Pakistan) and Greenland ice sheet (Greenland).
- Which country has the most beautiful glaciers?
- In our collection, the most come from Iceland (4), Greenland (3) and Chile (2).
- What is the largest glacier in the world?
- Leaving the ice sheets aside, the Lambert Glacier in East Antarctica is usually cited as the largest glacier in the world. The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are far larger bodies of ice.
- Why is glacier ice blue?
- Glacier ice is so dense that most air bubbles have been squeezed out of it. Thick, clear ice absorbs red light more strongly than blue, so the light that passes through and scatters back looks blue.
- How many glaciers are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 18 glaciers in 11 countries. Iceland has the most, with 4.