The Most Beautiful Glaciers in North America
5 places in 2 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful glaciers in North America are Greenland ice sheet (Greenland), Hubbard Glacier (United States) and Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq) (Greenland). The list covers 5 glaciers in 2 countries. Greenland has the most, with 3. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The far north of the Americas still holds ice on a scale that the rest of the world lost at the end of the last ice age. In Greenland, a single sheet of ice buries almost an entire island; along the coast of Alaska, moisture from the Gulf of Alaska falls as heavy snow on high mountains and feeds glaciers that flow all the way down to the sea. Where ice meets salt water, it calves, and that is where these glaciers are most spectacular.
The Greenland ice sheet is the second-largest body of ice on Earth after Antarctica, more than three kilometres thick at its centre. On its western edge, Jakobshavn Glacier, or Sermeq Kujalleq, is among the fastest-moving glaciers on the planet and fills Ilulissat Icefjord with icebergs. North of it, Eqi Glacier ends in a tall calving wall where blocks of ice break into the bay. In Alaska, Hubbard Glacier meets the sea with a front several kilometres wide and has advanced, unlike most of its neighbours. Margerie Glacier in Glacier Bay drops fresh ice from its blue-and-white face into Tarr Inlet.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Greenland ice sheet | Glacier | Greenland | |
| 2 | Hubbard Glacier | Glacier | United States | |
| 3 | Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq) | Glacier | Greenland | |
| 4 | Margerie Glacier | Glacier | United States | |
| 5 | Eqi Glacier | Glacier | Greenland |
01 Greenland ice sheet
Greenland76.700° N 41.200° W
Chmee2 / Valtameri · CC BY 3.0 It isn't a scaled-down copy of Antarctica, either. Greenland's ice sheet sits far enough south — between roughly 60° and 80° N — that it isn't actually inside the polar zone the way its southern counterpart is, and it lacks Antarctica's vast floating ice shelves. Instead the ice squeezes out through narrow fjords as outlet glaciers and "ice tongues," rivers of ice pushing directly into the sea rather than spreading out over it, which is part of why Greenland's edges look so different from Antarctica's from the air.
Did you know? In August 2021 rain fell for 13 hours at Summit Station, more than 3,200 metres up, where rain had never been recorded and there were no gauges to measure it.
02 Hubbard Glacier
United States60.314° N 139.371° W
Image by spalla67 from Pixabay The terminus is the spectacle. The ice front stretches for around 10 km across the head of Disenchantment Bay, and it stands about 100 metres above the waterline, with some 75 metres more hidden below. Blue-white pinnacles lean out over the water and regularly collapse, sending off icebergs as big as a ten-storey building with a roar that carries across the bay, while the white peaks of the Saint Elias range stand behind.
Did you know? Its growth is fed by an unusually large snow-collecting basin that reaches deep into the Saint Elias Mountains, far behind the visible ice front.
03 Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq)
Greenland69.983° N 50.117° W
Giles Laurent · CC BY-SA 4.0 The glacier discharges into Ilulissat Icefjord, which runs about 40 km west to Disko Bay. Icebergs calved at the front can stand hundreds of metres from waterline to keel; at the fjord mouth the largest run aground on a submerged moraine sill some 200 m down and sit there, jammed together, until they break up or are pushed out. The fjord is often packed wall to wall with ice — a white, creaking plain cut by leads of black water — and the bergs that escape drift out into Baffin Bay and south towards the Atlantic.
Did you know? The documentary Chasing Ice filmed a 75-minute calving here in which about 7.4 cubic kilometres of ice broke away, the longest calving ever captured on film.
04 Margerie Glacier
United States58.968° N 137.176° W
Image by gwynethjones from Pixabay What makes Margerie remarkable is how alive it is. It is one of the most active calving glaciers in the park: slabs and columns of ice break from the face with a crack like a gunshot and a long rumble that echoes round the inlet before the wave arrives. Because the water drops away steeply in front of the terminus, ships and smaller tour boats can hold position fairly close, and passengers often wait in silence on deck for the next fall. The meltwater and the turbulence of falling ice stir up krill and small fish, and seabirds gather to feed along the face.
Did you know? By the time John Muir arrived in 1879, the ice had already retreated about 48 miles up the bay.
05 Eqi Glacier
Greenland69.817° N 50.067° W
David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada · CC BY 2.0 The front is not uniform. Its northern part stands in shallow water, only a few metres to about 20 metres deep, where the ice face is very high and inclined and breaks off in frequent, large collapses. The southern part reaches into water 70 to 100 metres deep and ends in a lower, vertical cliff. Between the two, a ridge of bedrock breaks the surface. In 2016 researchers using radar watched this front around the clock and recorded more than nine hundred separate calving events in only six days, making Eqi one of the best-studied calving glaciers in Greenland.
Did you know? Of more than nine hundred calving events recorded in 2016, around 725 came from the shallow northern sector, nearly four times as many as from the deep southern one.
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 are the most beautiful glaciers in North America?
- On our list, Greenland ice sheet (Greenland) ranks first, followed by Hubbard Glacier (United States) and Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq) (Greenland).
- Which country has the most glaciers in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from Greenland (3) and the United States (2).
- How thick is the Greenland ice sheet?
- It reaches more than 3 kilometres in thickness near its centre and covers roughly four-fifths of Greenland.
- Is Hubbard Glacier advancing?
- Yes. Unlike most Alaskan glaciers, Hubbard has been advancing for over a century, and twice, in 1986 and 2002, it briefly closed off Russell Fjord with a dam of ice and debris.
- What is a tidewater glacier?
- A glacier that flows all the way to the sea and ends in a cliff of ice standing in salt water, where blocks break off, or calve, to form icebergs. Hubbard and Margerie are both tidewater glaciers.
- How many glaciers are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 5 glaciers in 2 countries. Greenland has the most, with 3.