French Southern Territories · TF

Glacier Arago

Glacier Arago is an eight-kilometre valley glacier descending from the Rallier du Baty ice cap on Grande Terre, the main island of the remote Kerguelen archipelago in the French Southern and Antarctic Lands. Named for the great French astronomer and physicist François Arago, it sits in the Vallée de Larmor between the peaks of Mont Henri Rallier du Baty and Le Bicorne, its terminus now lapping into a milky proglacial lake that did not exist within living memory. What makes this glacier remarkable to scientists and the few who glimpse it from expedition vessels is its dramatic, well-documented retreat. Satellite measurements reveal that Arago lost roughly three kilometres of length between 1964 and 2001 alone, while its ice thinned by an estimated eighty metres over the same period. In a sub-Antarctic world battered by the winds of the Roaring Forties, Arago has become one of the clearest visual records of how rapidly even the most isolated landscapes are responding to a warming climate.