Laguna San Rafael

The glacier groans and a wall of ice the size of a house peels away from the face, crashing into milky turquoise water and sending a wave across the lagoon. Icebergs the colour of deep sapphire drift past the catamaran as the crew chips 10,000-year-old glacial ice for your whisky. The only way here is by boat, through fjords so narrow the forest almost touches both sides of the hull.

Laguna San Rafael sits at 46° south in Chile's Aysén Region, where the San Rafael glacier — one of the only tidewater glaciers on Earth where temperate ice meets an ocean fjord — calves directly into a lagoon surrounded by virgin forest. The glacier is retreating at roughly 500 metres per year; the fjord you sail through to reach it didn't exist on any map 30 years ago. Access is exclusively by boat or seaplane, with three-day cruise ships overnighting in the fjord so passengers can kayak among icebergs at dawn. The surrounding Northern Patagonian Ice Field is the largest temperate ice mass outside the polar regions — the scale of the ice visible from water level is disorienting. Every visit to the San Rafael is a visit to something measurably disappearing.