evidence: Southern Patagonia Ice Field This grand panorama of the Southern Patagonia Ice Field was photographed by a crew member aboard the International Space Station (ISS) on a rare clear day in the southern Andes Mountains. With an area of 13,000 square kilometers (5,000 square miles), the ice field is the largest temperate ice sheet in the Southern Hemisphere. Storms that swirl into the region from the southern Pacific Ocean bring rain and snow (between 2 to 11 meters of rainfall per year), resulting in the buildup of the ice sheet. [...] Rignot, E., Rivera, A., Casassa, G. (2003) Contribution of the Patagonia Icefields of South America to Sea Level Rise (PDF). Science 302, 434-437.Astronaut photograph ISS038-E-47324 was acquired on February 13, 2014, with a Nikon D3S digital camera using a 65 millimeter lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the Expedition 38 crew. It has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by M. Justin Wilkinson, Jacobs at NASA-JSC.