Franz Josef Glacier

Franz Josef Glacier is a 12 kilometer long temperate maritime glacier in Westland Tai Poutini National Park on the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand. It descends from the Southern Alps to less than 300 meters above sea level, sharing its valley with temperate rain forest, an unusual pairing for a glacier of the temperate zone. The glacier follows cyclic patterns of advance and retreat, reaching its greatest extent during the Little Ice Age in the early eighteenth century and generally retreating over the past 14,000 years, though it regained nearly half the ice it had lost over the previous century between 1983 and 2008 before shrinking again by 1.5 kilometers between 2008 and 2017.