evidence: The park includes much of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field – the world’s second largest contiguous ice field beyond the poles. Classified as an expanse of ice covering less than 50 000 sq km, ice fields are formed by a large accumulation of snow which turns into ice with years of compression and freezing. Shaped by the underlying topography, glaciers often form at the edges of an ice field, draining the ice off. The Southern Patagonian Ice Field is the larger of two remnant parts of the Patagonian Ice Sheet, which covered all of southern Chile during the last glacial period some 12 000 years ago.