Chilean glacier popular with adventure travellers closed to hikers after huge ice chunk falls off

11.11.2023 - 01:59 / euronews.com / Angela Symons

Hikers have been permanently banned from a popular Patagonian glacier that has become unstable due to ice melt.

The decision by Chile's National Forestry Corporation has incensed adventure travellers and local guides alike. 

What officials see as a question of safety - citing rapid, destabilising melting - has sparked a debate over the risks of ice-climbing in a rapidly changing climate.

The Explorers, or Exploradores, glacier in Laguna San Rafael national park had been a well-trodden ice-hiking destination in the southern region of Aysén for at least two decades. But a two-week study by government hydrologists, found the glacier is reaching a dangerously unstable “inflection point.”

“There are evident risks and uncertainty regarding the behaviour of the glacier,” the forestry department, which oversees Chile’s national parks, said in an email permanently banning ice-hiking on 31 October. “Conditions are not safe for ecotourism activities on the Explorers Glacier,” it read.

Ice-climbers around the world are being forced to adapt to the effects of warmer temperatures on well-known routes. 

Last July an apartment building-sized chunk of the Marmolada glacier in Italy’s Dolomite mountain collapsed onto a popular hiking route, killing 11 people. The same summer a number of agencies canceled ascents of Mont Blanc for the first time, as melting ice loosened an alarming number of rockfalls.

Nonetheless, the overnight closure of Explorers came as a shock to local guides.

Bianca Miranda has been leading expeditions on the glacier for over a decade and her local tourism company now faces the burden of refunding agencies who had booked up to March 2024.

The national park itself will remain open, and its 20,000 annual visitors will still be able to see the glacier by boat. For Miranda, however, the end of hiking Explorers is just personally painful.

“For us the closing is not only an economic blow but also an emotional one,” she says. “We have been working in this place for more than 10 years and it has become our second home.”

The study - and eventual closure of Explorers - came after a huge chunk of ice fell off, or calved, the main glacier on 6 October.

No hikers were harmed, and guides like Miranda have said the incident was normal for a constantly changing glacial landscape. The government’s study however suggests enormous fragmentation will soon become much more common.

The Explorers glacier has 'thinned' by 0.5 meters per year, according to drone images collected by government hydrologists since 2020. The number of meltwater lagoons sitting on top of the glacier has also doubled in that time. As the glacier’s overall surface contact with water increases - either where the glacier ends in Chileno valley or with its