75) Gabietos

The Gabietos glacier is located inside a small cirque carved out between the Picos del Taillón (3,144 m) and Gabieto (3,034 m). Due to its characteristic location, it is visible from numerous areas and peaks in the Occitan and Aragonese Pyrenees.
The morphology of the suspended cirque that houses it did not allow it to develop a tongue of ice towards the outside, while the steep slope at the exit of the cirque caused its front to fracture, breaking away from the body of the glacier in the form of needles and seracs. During the Little Ice Age, its maximum length did not exceed 600 metres and it covered an area of 12 hectares. These limitations prevented it from becoming one of the largest glaciers in the mountain range.
At its upper end, at the end of the 19th century, the ice reached the Col des Gabietos. The structure of the cirque has been the reason why the retreat of the front has been unremarkable. Its loss of extent has been significant at the upper end of the glacier, reducing the unevenness occupied by the ice.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, its powerful crevasses have given way to ice showing weak activity, drastically reducing its capacity for movement until it became a helero. A little over a decade ago, its triangular shape became more pronounced and in its feeding zone it was common to see stratified snow from different years. At its front, a small mountain lake nestled in the frontal moraine retains some of the meltwater.
In the 1990s, the process of erosion material covering the ice began at the lower right end of its front. This process has accelerated in recent years, and it is now considered a black glacier.
It is currently the 18th largest glacier in the Pyrenees and the 3rd largest in the Gavarnie Massif.