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6 years ago

Last Glacier Standing in Venezuela

In 1910, glaciers covered at least 4 square miles (10 square km) of the mountainous region of northwestern Venezuela. Today, less than one percent of that ice remains, and all of it is locked up in one glacier. The ongoing retreat of Humboldt Glacier—Venezuela’s last patch of perennial ice—means that the country could soon be glacier-free.

The glacier is in the highest part of the Andes Mountains, on a slope at nearly 16,000 feet. A cold and snowy climate at high elevations is key for glaciers to exist in the tropics. Most of Earth’s tropical glaciers are found in the Andes, which runs through Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. But warming air temperatures have contributed to their decline, including Humboldt Glacier.

The relatively recent changes to Humboldt are evident in these images, acquired on Jan. 20, 1988, by the United States Geological Survey’s Landsat 5 and on Jan. 6, 2015, by Landsat 8. The images are false-color to better differentiate between areas of snow and ice (blue), land (brown) and vegetation (green).

Scientists are trying to understand how long Humboldt will remain. One said: “Let’s call it no more than 10 to 20 years.”