Andes
The Andes or Andean Mountains () are the longest continental mountain range in the world, forming a continuous highland along the western edge of South America. This range is about long, about wide (widest between 18° south and 20° south latitude), and of an average height of about . The Andes extend from north to south through seven South American countries: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.
Andes
Though precipitation increases with the height, there are semiarid conditions in the nearly highest mountains of the Andes. This dry steppe climate is considered to be typical of the subtropical position at 32–34° S. The valley bottoms have no woods, just dwarf scrub. The largest glaciers, as e.g. the Plomo glacier and the Horcones glaciers, do not even reach in length and have an only insignificant ice thickness. At glacial times, however, c. 20,000 years ago, the glaciers were over ten times longer. On the east side of this section of the Mendozina Andes, they flowed down to and on the west side to about above sea level. The massifs of Cerro Aconcagua (), Cerro Tupungato () and Nevado Juncal () are tens of kilometres away from each other and were connected by a joint ice stream network. The Andes' dendritic glacier arms, i.e. components of valley glaciers, were up to long, over thick and overspanned a vertical distance of . The climatic glacier snowline (ELA) was lowered from to at glacial times.