Frontal collapse of San Quintín glacier (Northern Patagonia Icefield), the last piedmont glacier lobe in the Andes

Glacier fronts are retreating across the globe in response to climate warming, revealing valleys, fiords, and proglacial lakes. The piedmont lobe of San Quintín, the largest glacier of the Northern Patagonia Icefield, in southern Chile, has recently entered a catastrophic phase of frontal retreat, where its terminus is rapidly disintegrating into large tabular icebergs calving into a new proglacial lake. We present results of a unique airborne GPR survey of the terminus of this large Patagonian glacier (763 km² in 2017), complemented with an analysis of ice flow velocity, satellite imagery, and ice elevation change to show that the ongoing retreat is caused by recent detachment of a floating terminus from the glacier bed and may shortly lead to the disappearance of the last existing piedmont lobe in Patagonia. Finally, we discuss how the observations of San Quintín’s ongoing collapse may give insights into processes governing frontal retreat of fast-flowing temperate glaciers and the quasi-stability of the floating termini.