Canada has the world’s largest glacier area outside the main ice sheets

Main Points

• Canada has 159,708 sq km of glaciated area
• Greenland and Antarctic totals exclude their main ice sheets
• China ranks fourth ahead of the US and Russia

Canada has the largest glaciated area in the world when the vast Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are excluded, according to data from the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS).

The figures shown in the graphic put Canada first with 159,708 square kilometres of glaciers. WGMS confirms the same total for Canada, with glaciers concentrated mainly in the Canadian High Arctic and the western mountain ranges.

Greenland ranks second with 145,551 sq km and Antarctica third with 132,867 sq km, but there is an important qualification. Those figures exclude their main ice sheets. Greenland’s ice sheet alone covers roughly 1.7 million sq km, while the Antarctic ice sheet covers almost 14 million sq km. The ranking therefore compares glaciers and peripheral ice rather than the total amount of ice in each territory.

China comes fourth on the graphic with 64,679 sq km, followed by the United States with 62,896 sq km and Russia with 53,873 sq km. Chile, Pakistan, India and Iceland complete the top 10.

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Pakistan and India stand out because much of their glacier ice is concentrated in the high mountains of Asia. Pakistan is shown with 15,917 sq km, slightly ahead of India's 15,417 sq km.

WGMS cautions that national glacier-area totals should not be treated as perfectly precise or directly contemporary measurements. Its inventories combine surveys from different periods and with varying levels of accuracy, and glaciers are continually changing.

That change is increasingly important. WGMS measurements show widespread glacier loss across regions including Alaska, Arctic Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Central Europe, Central Asia and the Southern Andes.