Which Country Has the Most Glaciers?

The answer depends on whether you count individual glaciers or measure the total area they cover, and it shifts again depending on whether ice caps and ice sheets are included. By raw number of distinct glacier bodies, several countries compete for the top spot. The United States, through Alaska alone, likely hosts more than 100,000 individual glaciers. But countries across High Mountain Asia, Scandinavia, and the Southern Andes also hold staggering numbers, and measuring total glacierized area reshuffles the rankings entirely. The question sounds simple, but glacier science has spent decades wrestling with how to answer it.

Why the Answer Keeps Changing

Counting glaciers is harder than it sounds. A glacier is not a fixed, neatly bordered object. Ice bodies split apart as they shrink, merge when they advance, and sit at every scale from continent-spanning ice sheets down to tiny ice patches clinging to a single north-facing cliff. Whether those smallest ice patches qualify as “glaciers” is genuinely debatable, and the threshold researchers choose for a minimum size can add or subtract tens of thousands of entries from a country’s total.

Global glacier databases have evolved over decades. Earlier efforts like the World Glacier Inventory compiled point-location data using the tools available at the time, but lacked the ability to store glacier outlines or detailed topographic information. The development of satellite imagery, sophisticated mapping software, and modern databases like GLIMS aimed to build on and improve that earlier work.

The most widely used modern database, the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI), catalogs more than 215,000 glaciers worldwide, excluding the two great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. But that number is a snapshot, not a permanent tally. Glaciers fragment as they retreat, so the count in a region can actually increase even as total ice area plummets. Austria illustrates this paradox in miniature: its latest inventory lists 799 glaciers, but most of them are tiny remnants, with 87% smaller than half a square kilometer. The total glacierized area dropped by about 31% in roughly 15 years.

The United States and Its Alaskan Ice

Alaska is the wild card in any global glacier ranking. The state’s glaciers cover roughly 75,000 square kilometers, about 5% of Alaska’s land area. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the total number of existing glaciers in Alaska has never been systematically counted, but the figure probably exceeds 100,000.¹ That estimate alone would make the United States one of the most glacier-rich countries on Earth by sheer count, though it is worth noting that many of those glaciers are small cirque or valley glaciers scattered across the coastal mountain ranges.

By total glacierized area, Alaska’s contribution also puts the U.S. near the top of any global list. The state contains some of North America’s largest individual glaciers, and its tidewater glaciers feed directly into the Pacific and Arctic oceans. Yet because “the United States” conjures images of temperate cities and farmland, Alaska’s ice often surprises people who have not looked at a topographic map of the state’s southern coast.

Canada and Russia Hold Enormous Ice Reserves

Canada is usually cited alongside or ahead of the United States in total glacier area, depending on the source. The Canadian Arctic Archipelago alone contains more than 300 glaciers that terminate in the ocean, and those are just the marine-terminating ones; thousands more sit inland across the archipelago’s islands.² Add the glaciers of the Canadian Rockies, the Coast Mountains of British Columbia, and the vast ice caps of Ellesmere Island, and Canada’s total glacierized area ranks among the world’s largest. Much of this ice sits in remote, sparsely monitored territory, which is part of why precise counts remain difficult.

Russia holds a similar position. Its Arctic archipelagos, particularly Novaya Zemlya, Franz Josef Land, and Severnaya Zemlya, carry substantial ice. Recent satellite measurements show that these regions are losing mass at a combined rate of roughly 22 gigatons per year, with about half of that loss concentrated on Novaya Zemlya, where large outlet and tidewater glaciers are thinning rapidly at their lower elevations.³ Russia also has glaciers in the Caucasus, the Altai Mountains, and Kamchatka, though these are far smaller in total area than the Arctic ice.

Norway rounds out the high-latitude contenders. The Svalbard archipelago, while home to a relatively modest number of named glaciers compared to Alaska or the Canadian Arctic, has a large glacierized area relative to its land mass. Mainland Norway also hosts glaciers, including well-known ones like Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier on the European continent.

High Mountain Asia’s Overwhelming Numbers

If you are looking for the single region with the most individual glaciers packed into the smallest geographic footprint, High Mountain Asia is hard to beat. An updated inventory covering the ranges from the Hindu Kush and Karakoram through the Himalaya, the Tibetan Plateau, and into the Tien Shan identified 134,770 glaciers with a combined area of roughly 100,700 square kilometers.⁴ Those glaciers are spread across more than a dozen countries, including China, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and Bhutan.

China, by most inventories, claims the largest share of those glaciers simply because so much of the Tibetan Plateau and the western mountain ranges fall within its borders. Pakistan is sometimes described as having more glaciers than any country outside the polar regions, a claim rooted in the extraordinary concentration of ice in the Karakoram and parts of the western Himalaya. That statement is imprecise, though, because it depends on which inventory you use and whether you count by number or by area. What is unambiguous is that the Karakoram stands out globally for having some glaciers that are stable or even advancing, a phenomenon sometimes called the “Karakoram anomaly,” while glaciers across most of the rest of High Mountain Asia are in retreat.

The water-security stakes in this region are enormous. The Tien Shan and Pamir ranges, for example, supply meltwater to the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, which downstream countries like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan depend on for irrigation and hydropower. Early stages of glacier retreat can temporarily boost river flows, but projections suggest annual streamflow could decline by 5 to 31% by mid-century as glaciers shrink past a tipping point.⁵ For hundreds of millions of people across South and Central Asia, the answer to “which country has the most glaciers” is less an academic curiosity than a preview of future water conflict.

Chile and Argentina’s Southern Icefields

South America’s glacier wealth is concentrated in its southern spine. Chile’s glacier inventory shows a striking geographic imbalance: roughly 89% of the country’s glaciers sit in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, with only tiny fractions in the northern desert ranges and central Andes.⁶ The Northern Patagonian Icefield, located entirely within Chile, is the second-largest ice mass in the Southern Hemisphere outside Antarctica.⁷

Argentina shares the even larger Southern Patagonian Icefield with Chile, along with numerous glaciers in Tierra del Fuego and the subtropical Andes. Together, the two countries hold the overwhelming majority of glacier ice in South America. By total glacierized area, Chile and Argentina rank well above any other Southern Hemisphere country outside Antarctica. But by individual glacier count, both countries fall far behind the massive inventories of High Mountain Asia and the Arctic.

Patagonia’s glaciers are also among the fastest-changing on Earth. The Southern Andes is one of the world’s glacierized regions with the most negative mass balances, meaning these glaciers are losing more ice each year than they gain from snowfall. Large calving glaciers like the famous Perito Moreno in Argentina are dramatic exceptions that periodically advance, but the regional trend is strongly downward.

Small Countries With Surprisingly Many Glaciers

Not every glacier-rich country is a vast Arctic or mountain nation. Austria’s 799 glaciers are scattered across the Alps, concentrated in five subregions that together hold 88% of the country’s glacier area. The Ötztal Alps alone account for about 35% of Austrian glacier coverage.⁸ Austria’s glaciers are shrinking at roughly 2.1% per year, a rate that has accelerated sharply compared to earlier decades. The nine largest glaciers, those bigger than 5 square kilometers, account for more than a quarter of the total ice area, and their decline disproportionately drives the country’s overall loss.

Switzerland, Iceland, and New Zealand all hold glacier populations that are modest in global terms but culturally and economically significant. Iceland’s glaciers, including Vatnajökull (Europe’s largest by volume), feed hydroelectric systems and attract tourism. New Zealand’s glaciers in the Southern Alps, like the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers, are among the few that descend into temperate rainforest, making them geographical oddities. These smaller inventories are also easier to monitor precisely, which means they often produce the most detailed records of how fast glaciers are changing.

Tropical Glaciers and the Edges of the Map

Glaciers near the equator seem paradoxical, but they exist wherever mountains are high enough to stay cold year-round. Peru’s Cordillera Blanca, a range in the tropical Andes, hosts a substantial number of glaciers, though they are thinning and retreating rapidly as the climate warms. That retreat has increased the number and size of moraine-dammed glacial lakes forming in the narrow bedrock valleys below, creating a growing hazard for downstream communities.⁹

The most precarious tropical glaciers are near Puncak Jaya in Papua, Indonesia, the highest peak between the Himalayas and the Andes. These are the last remaining tropical glaciers in the Western Pacific Warm Pool. Recent measurements show a roughly 5.4-fold increase in thinning rate, amplified by the strong 2015–2016 El Niño, and at the current pace of ice loss, they will likely disappear within a decade.¹⁰ Their disappearance would remove Indonesia from the list of glacier-bearing countries entirely, a reminder that the answer to “which country has the most glaciers” is not fixed. Countries drop off the list as ice vanishes.

Africa has a similar story playing out on Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya, and the Rwenzori Mountains. These glaciers are vanishingly small by global standards but are among the most studied examples of tropical ice loss. Their disappearance, widely expected within coming decades, will eliminate glaciers from the African continent.

When Glaciers Redraw Borders

In mountainous regions, national borders often follow ridgelines and watershed divides, and glaciers have historically been treated as part of those boundaries. When glaciers melt and retreat, the ridgeline and the ice surface can shift, sometimes by hundreds of meters, which means the border itself may move. Switzerland and Italy have dealt with this directly: their formal boundary dates back to the 1559 Treaty of Varese, which recognized glaciers as part of the demarcation line. In 2009, the two countries created a commission to review and, if necessary, adjust their borders because of glacial melting.⁵

This is not just a European curiosity. Along the Himalayan border regions, India, Pakistan, and China all have overlapping territorial claims in heavily glacierized areas, and the Siachen Glacier has been a site of military conflict between India and Pakistan for decades. In South America, Chile and Argentina have disputed icefields near their shared border. As glaciers recede and expose new rock, the basis for older boundary agreements erodes along with the ice, potentially reopening questions that diplomats thought were settled.

Rock Glaciers and the Counting Problem

Standard glacier inventories focus on bodies of ice, but the mountain landscape also contains rock glaciers: slow-moving masses of rock and interstitial ice that creep downhill under gravity. These are not glaciers in the traditional sense, yet they store meaningful amounts of frozen water. A systematic inventory of active rock glaciers in the contiguous United States identified more than 10,300 of them across the western states, with nearly 88% concentrated in just five states: Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah.¹¹

Rock glaciers matter to the “which country has the most” question because they blur the boundary of what gets counted. If rock glaciers were included in standard inventories, the numbers for mountainous countries at mid-latitudes, places like the U.S., Argentina, and Switzerland, would jump substantially. They are generally excluded because they behave differently from true glaciers: they move more slowly, respond to climate on longer timescales, and their ice is insulated by a rocky debris layer. Still, in a warming world where many true glaciers are disappearing, rock glaciers may become increasingly important as frozen water reserves, particularly in arid mountain regions where summer meltwater feeds agriculture and municipal water supplies.

1
U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper. Glaciers of North America – Glaciers of Alaska
2
PubMed Central. Atmospheric forcing of rapid marine-terminating glacier retreat in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago
3
The Cryosphere. Brief communication: Increased glacier mass loss in the Russian High Arctic (2010–2017)
4
The Cryosphere. Brief communication: Updated GAMDAM glacier inventory over high-mountain Asia
5
International Journal of Research and Scientific Innovation. Glacial Retreat and Water Security: What Are the Long-Term Implications of Glacier Melt in the Tien Shan and Pamir Mountains for Downstream Water Availability in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan?
6
Annals of Glaciology. Glacier inventory and recent glacier variations in the Andes of Chile, South America
7
The Cryosphere. Projecting the evolution of the Northern Patagonian Icefield until the year 2200
8
The Cryosphere. On thin glacial ice: New Austrian Glacier Inventory shows accelerating glacier shrinkage and 31 % area loss within two decades
9
Boreas. Landsystem analysis of a tropical moraine‐dammed supraglacial lake, Llaca Lake, Cordillera Blanca, Perú
10
PubMed Central. Disappearance of the last tropical glaciers in the Western Pacific Warm Pool (Papua, Indonesia) appears imminent
11
Copernicus Publications. Active rock glaciers of the contiguous United States: geographic information system inventory and spatial distribution patterns