Story and Photos by Shayah Kosak I am standing on the prow of a small boat, hair whipping in the frigid Patagonian wind, crossing the vast, binational waters of Lake San Martín, whose irregular arms stretch from Chile into Argentina. Ahead, a wall of ice more than 250 feet high rises directly from the lake, calved from the Southern Patagonia Ice Field, one of the largest remaining ice masses outside the polar regions. It is easy, in moments like this, for glaciers to feel as if they exist beyond the jurisdiction of human laws, conventions, and society, standing tall above our everyday problems. Yet they are anything but insulated from human influence. Storing nearly 70 percent of the world’s freshwater, glaciers and ice sheets act as vast, slow-release reservoirs, regulating river flows and sustaining ecosystems long after seasonal snow has disappeared. Their significance is felt most clearly downstream, where communities may never see the ice itself but rely on its gradual melt for drinking water, agriculture, hydropower, and ecological stability. That dependence is becoming increasingly precarious. Across Patagonia and the broader southern Andes, rising temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns are reshaping glaciers in uneven but unmistakable ways. Most are thinning and retreating, some rapidly, others more slowly, their responses shaped by elevation, orientation, and local climate. What appears from a distance as a stable wall of ice is, in reality, a dynamic system already under stress.
Understanding that shift, from apparent stability to systemic vulnerability, requires both distance and proximity. I’m here in Argentina to witness firsthand the phenomena I study in my geography courses at the Universidad Austral de Chile. Much of my work relies on GIS and remote sensing, which reveal glaciers, watersheds, and mountain systems as continuous landscapes from above, systems that ignore political boundaries even as their use and protection are governed by them. Yet while satellite data makes these connections visible, being present in these places provides an indispensable perspective, grounding abstract patterns in scale, texture, and lived reality. The implications of this retreat extend well beyond the loss of ice. As glaciers thin and recede, they alter the timing and volume of meltwater, reshaping river systems and downstream ecosystems across the Andes. In the Patagonian Andes alone, glaciers and snow-fed systems supply freshwater to more than 2.4 million people, demonstrating how closely human life is tied to the stability of these frozen reservoirs. Retreating ice can also leave behind unstable glacial lakes and frozen ground, increasing the risk of sudden outburst floods and slope failures that can propagate far from their mountain origins. In Peru, for example, such events have killed more than 10,000 people over the past century. At the same time, the cumulative loss of glacier mass contributes to global sea-level rise, while regional changes in glacier mass balance remain among the clearest physical indicators of a warming climate.
Ley 26.639
In October 2010, Argentina took a step no other country had yet attempted. With the passing of Law 26.639, the nation adopted the world’s first comprehensive glacier protection law, establishing binding limits on what could, and could not, take place in glacierized landscapes. The law was short, just eighteen articles, but its ambition was unusually broad, extending protection not only to glaciers themselves but also to the frozen and ice-rich ground that surrounds them.
At its core, the law defines glaciers as strategic public assets, framing them explicitly as water reserves essential for human consumption, agriculture, biodiversity, scientific research, and tourism. It adopts an expansive scientific definition of glaciers, encompassing ice bodies of all sizes and states of conservation, and extends similar protection to periglacial environments, areas of frozen or ice-saturated ground usually at the edges of glaciers that regulate water resources, particularly in high and mid-mountain regions.
Protest banner in Buenos Aires declaring “Don’t touch the glacier law”, associated with Rebellion or Extinction Argentina.
To operationalize this protection, the law mandates the creation of a National Glacier Inventory, requiring the identification, classification, and regular monitoring of all glaciers and periglacial landforms by hydrographic basin. This inventory must be updated at least every five years, tracking changes in surface area, advance or retreat, and other indicators relevant to conservation.
Most consequentially, the law prohibits a range of activities deemed incompatible with glacier preservation, including mining, hydrocarbon exploration, industrial development, and the release of pollutants, restrictions that apply equally within periglacial environments. Other activities are permitted only after environmental impact assessments and with guaranteed public participation, while low-impact scientific research, emergency response, and non-motorized mountain sports are explicitly allowed.
Yet the same breadth that gives the law its strength has also generated its most persistent challenges. By drawing hard boundaries around glacial and periglacial landscapes, Law 26.639 leaves little room for nuance in how different uses, risks, and regional conditions are treated.
That tension is no longer theoretical. As of February 2nd, Argentina’s glacier protection law is actively under debate in Congress, with proposed reforms introduced by President Javier Milei’s government during extraordinary legislative sessions. The reform proposals seek to narrow how glaciers and periglacial environments are defined and to relax restrictions on mining and other extractive activities in protected zones. Supporters of the reform proposals argue that narrowing the law is necessary to attract investment and spur economic growth; critics, including scientists and environmental organizations, warn that weakening the law would undermine protections for strategic freshwater reserves at a moment of accelerating glacier loss.
The Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires, the seat of Argentina’s executive branch, where President Milei’s administration has proposed reforms to the Glacier Law.
One recurring critique is that the law makes no meaningful distinction between large-scale commercial activities and smaller, locally driven interventions. In regions facing emerging hazards, such as unstable glacial lakes or thawing ice-rich ground, this blanket approach can complicate efforts to reduce risk or adapt to changing conditions. Measures intended to stabilize slopes, manage meltwater, or lower lake levels may fall into the same regulatory category as extractive industries, even though their purposes and impacts differ substantially.
The law also assumes a level of scientific clarity that, in practice, remains difficult to achieve. Periglacial environments often look vastly different from each other, with a variety of possible features, making them difficult to classify. As glacier retreat accelerates and new ice-rich features emerge, the gap between legal definitions and evolving physical realities continues to widen.
These challenges are compounded by geography. A significant number of Argentina’s glaciers lie on or across international borders. Ice, water, and risk do not conform to political boundaries, yet the law’s authority stops at the national line. In transboundary basins, glacier retreat, meltwater flows, and hazards such as glacial lake outburst floods may originate outside Argentina’s jurisdiction while producing consequences within it, raising questions about how a national law can manage processes that are inherently regional in nature.
These limitations do not negate Argentina’s glacier law; they clarify what it is and what it is not. Law 26.639 cannot halt climate change, redraw international borders, or resolve every scientific ambiguity embedded in frozen ground. It cannot perfectly anticipate how glaciers, periglacial environments, or hydrological systems will evolve in a warming world. What it can do is establish a line, legal, political, and moral, around landscapes that have long been treated as distant, expendable, or unknowable. In that sense, the law’s imperfections are inseparable from its significance. By acting before complete certainty was available, Argentina acknowledged a reality that many governments still resist: Waiting for full scientific clarity often means acting too late. Glaciers retreat on climatic timescales, not legislative ones, and their loss carries consequences that unfold far beyond the mountains where ice is visible.
Whether Argentina’s approach can be replicated elsewhere remains an open question. Countries differ in their legal traditions, economic pressures, and relationships to mountain landscapes. Yet the underlying dilemma is shared. As climate change accelerates, societies will increasingly be forced to govern systems that are slow-moving, spatially diffuse, and only partially understood, systems whose failure may be sudden, irreversible, or felt far downstream. As our boat turns back across Lake San Martín, the glacier slips from view behind the lake’s winding arms, its scale lingering more as an idea than an image. Moments earlier, it had felt immutable, towering beyond the reach of human concern. Now, leaving it behind, that sense of permanence gives way to something more fragile, an awareness of how exposed even the largest ice masses are to forces set in motion far beyond this remote landscape. That shift in perspective mirrors the logic behind Argentina’s glacier law. The law does not offer a perfect solution. What it offers is something rarer: a willingness to treat frozen landscapes not as scenery, but as critical infrastructure, and to legislate accordingly. In a rapidly changing world, such laws may not represent the final answer, but they may prove to be a necessary beginning, one that should be strengthened and expanded upon, rather than reversed.