Can you guess the snowiest place on Earth?

Where is the snowiest place on Earth? Snow enthusiasts have been discussing it for a long time, but there’s no consensus.

Could it be the Great Lakes, where feet of lake-effect snow falls at a time? The Sierra Nevada, where atmospheric rivers produce prolific snowfall when they slam into mountain peaks? Or maybe it’s Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, which happens to be having a growth spurt?

Or … none of the above?

The answer might surprise you.

The snowiest place is: the Andes Mountains in southern Chile, where around 2,000 inches of snow falls each year, on average. That’s over 166 feet, almost the length of two basketball courts, or equivalent to about 15 stories of snow.

We shoveled our way to the snowiest place on the planet by using an atmospheric reanalysis tool, which reconstructs weather history using satellite data, weather station reports, aircraft observations and more ash

This tool comes with uncertainties, but is good at broadly depicting where it snows a lot and where it might just snow the most. But, it still should be taken with a grain of salt … err, snow!

This estimate - for places above 8,500 feet elevation in Patagonia - is supported by snow research that took place on the Southern Patagonian Ice Field.

The research confirmed annual average snowfall of more than 2,250 inches at the Pio XI glacier between 2001-2005.

Southern Patagonian Ice Field

The Southern Patagonian Ice Field is the largest body of ice in the Southern Hemisphere outside of Antarctica. It’s the world’s second largest ice field outside of the polar region, spanning almost 6,500 square miles. Only a national park in Alaska has a larger ice field.

Located between 48 and 51 degrees south latitude, the park is home to four dozen glaciers, whose meltwater flows into lakes, rivers and the Pacific Ocean.

The snowy location is in Chile’s southernmost region, Magallanes and Antarctica Chilena, about 250 miles north of Punta Arenas. It’s more than 1,000 miles south of Santiago, the country’s capital and largest city.

“I can definitely confirm that the Southern Patagonia Ice Field is a snowy and windy place, and I would not be surprised if it is the snowiest place on the planet,” said Margit Schwikowski, professor emeritus from the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Schwikowski and a team of six researchers, including three Chilean glaciologists, visited the ice field in August 2006 to take ice cores from the Pio XI Glacier, the largest in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field.

“Although our work was finished after four days, we spent two weeks in tents up there. We could not get out because of snowfall and strong winds,” Schwikowski said.

Because of the conditions, the expedition required extreme winter weather gear, including tents that were constructed to resist the strong winds. However, the wind was so harsh that it allowed snow to infiltrate the drilling tent - it was rare to not have full whiteout conditions while the work was ongoing, she said.

“We took especially rigid tents, a lot of food and skis to be able to get out on our own if the helicopter could not fly. We prepared the GPS track of the escape route to Argentina,” recalled Schwikowski.

In other words, don’t try this at home. Getting to the snowiest place on the planet requires intricate planning, strong mountaineering skills, an escape route and much more.

It’s not about to become the next Instagram hot spot.

What makes it so snowy

“Patagonia is such a unique place,” said Diego Campos, a researcher at the Earth Sciences Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. He is originally from Santiago, Chile.

He said that the storm track passes directly through the region and that precipitation occurs year round, but is highest during the winter months of June, July and August.

His research also found that the region had very high levels of annual precipitation, but noted that a lack of weather reporting stations in the region made it difficult to corroborate precipitation estimates.

To understand more about the weather dynamics of this particularly snowy place, we need to head up to where the jets fly - the jet stream.

This ribbon of fast-moving air in the upper atmosphere carries storm systems from west to east.

Southern Patagonia is the first land mass that the jet stream blows into after traveling across the Pacific Ocean for thousands of miles, picking up plenty of moisture along the way.

When the strong winds meet the mountains of Southern Patagonia, some of which stand taller than 10,000 feet, the air is forced to rise, causing the Pacific moisture to cool and condense into snow-bearing clouds.

Where to go if you want more snow

This analysis doesn’t end at the snowiest place. If the Southern Patagonian Ice Field is too adventurous for your tastes, there are other locations that commonly experience several stories’ worth of snow each year.

The snowiest place in North America is the Chugach Mountains in Alaska, which receive upward of 1,250 inches a year on average.

“The Chugach Mountains receive some of the heaviest snowfall in the world. The high latitude and proximity to cold, continental air means a large fraction of the precipitation falls as snow,” said Alaska-based climatologist Brian Brettschneider.

In the contiguous 48 states, there’s the Tug Hill Plateau in western New York, where lake-effect snow can run rife during the winter months. There are also the Western Maine Mountains, Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada and the Cascades.

In Canada, the snowiest provinces are Newfoundland and Labrador, northern Quebec, eastern Nunavut and British Columbia - fueled by coastal storms in the east that tap into the moisture-rich waters of the Atlantic and atmospheric rivers in the west.

Southern Greenland boasts tons of snow, as does western and northern Japan, which is a factory for extreme snowfall when very cold Siberian air masses meet the relatively warm waters of the Sea of Japan. In the same general area, there’s Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.

Several mountain ranges in eastern Kazakhstan and Russia qualify in the snowiest 25% club, as does the uninhabited Severny Island in the Barents Sea.

The Himalayas in Asia are a snow haven, boasting the world’s tallest mountain, Everest, along the border of China and Nepal.

[Measuring up: How meteorologists gauge the snowfall as Anchorage nears a season record]

Norway, northern Sweden, Iceland and Svalbard also made the snowiest places list. In addition to having a particularly snowy climate and a population of just 2,500 people, Svalbard, sitting at 74 to 81 degrees north latitude, has a “doomsday” seed vault that contains over 860,000 varieties of global seeds.

Also making the list are the Swiss Alps and parts of several mountain ranges in eastern Turkey and western Georgia.

The continuous strip of high snowfall in the Southern Hemisphere’s Southern Ocean is perhaps the most notable feature on the above snow map. Because of a lack of landmasses in this part of the world, the jet stream flows from west-to-east unabated, routinely carrying storms not just capable of producing blizzards, but waves as big as 78 feet.

New Zealand’s Southern Alps also make the list, as do the northern Andes Mountains in Peru, taking us back to near where this journey began, in Chile.

Suddenly, shoveling a few inches of snow off your front walkway doesn’t sound so bad.

Ben Noll is a meteorologist with extensive experience working with meteorological data and creating weather graphics, developing meteorological services in the Pacific Islands, and short, medium, and long-range weather prediction.