Originally this story Appears on Atlas Obscura and be part of Climate table cooperation.
In 1986, at the age of 21, Alejandra Melfo moved to Mérida, Venezuela, “the city of eternal snow”, to study physics at the University of the Andes. There, in the mountain city, she often looked out over the horizon in the great Sierra Nevada de Mérida: a vast, burly, towering expanse of three miles into the sky and covered with snow and trees. vast glaciers. Having just arrived in Uruguay, a country without mountains, she fell in love.
As the years passed, Melfo saw the landscape change. Two of the glaciers visible from the city are receding rapidly. Large cracks appear, breaking the ice into smaller blocks. Entire sections of the glacier collapsed, exposing the rock underneath. By 1990, one mountain, Pico La Concha, had lost its entire glacier. In 2017, Pico Bolivar, Venezuela’s highest peak, followed. Today, only one glacier remains in Venezuela: on the second highest peak, Pico Humboldt.
“It was the era that [almost] Melfo, a particle physicist at the University of the Andes, who has recently worked on projects related to biology and ecology, including research on this last glacier.
Pico Humboldt’s glacier has survived in part because it’s sheltered by the shade of its own peak — but only in moderation. In 1910, the glacier covered an area of nearly 1.3 square miles. NS last measurement, in 2019, showing that the glacier has shrunk to less than 0.02 square miles, or the size of Mérida’s football stadium, 2% less than before. If glaciers disappear, Venezuela could become the first country in the world to have glaciers and then lose them all.
According to experts, this is inevitable because no climate intervention will slow or stop it in time. The tropical glaciers of Venezuela – like other glaciers, in places such as Colombia, Peru, Kenya, or Uganda — are particularly sensitive to climate change, since they have been regularly exposed to warm temperatures. By the end of the decade, the last one will be gone. “The retreat, you can’t stop it, it’s impossible,” said Maximiliano Bezada, a quaternary geologist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the current study of the glacier.
But rather than despair, a team of scientists based in Venezuela is looking for a rare opportunity. These glaciers have existed for hundreds of thousands of years, and now the peaks they once covered are likely to remain permanently covered by ice for thousands of years. This transition, Melfo said, provides a unique window into how life emerges in essentially uninhabited landforms, a process known as “primary succession.”
“[We’re] witness the exact moment that these things move from one state to the next. This is very special,” she said. “It’s rare that you get to see things on a geological scale happening right in front of your eyes.”
Scientific work begins with a series of long, steep walks. In 2019, Melfo and an interdisciplinary team, including a botanist, ecologist, lichenologist, etc., made three trips to Pico Humboldt. At more than three miles, with a lot of equipment to carry and without much experience with such conditions, it took the team two to three days to get close to the foot of Pico Humboldt’s glacier.
