A grim milestone in the struggle against climate change has now been reached, as the disappearance of Venezuela’s final glacier means the country has won the race to be the first to see all of its ice bodies melt. As recently as 1910, the South American nation boasted six glaciers spanning a total area of 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), yet these have been reduced to mere smatterings of ice that no longer meet the requirements to be classed as glaciers.
Five of the country’s glaciers had already gone by 2011, with just the Humboldt glacier – also known as La Corona – clinging on in the Sierra Nevada National Park. However, the frozen landmark has now shrunk so much that it has been reclassified as an ice field.
“In Venezuela there are no more glaciers,” Professor Julio Cesar Centeno from the University of the Andes (ULA) told AFP in March. “What we have is a piece of ice that is 0.4 percent of its original size.”
In its heyday, La Corona covered 4.5 square kilometers (1.7 square miles), yet it now stretches for less than 0.02 square kilometers (2 hectares). Generally, a piece of ice must extend for at least 0.1 square kilometers (10 hectares) to be considered a glacier.
Research conducted over the past half-decade has indicated that glacial coverage in Venezuela declined by 98 percent between 1953 and 2019. The rate of ice loss accelerated rapidly after 1998, reaching a peak of around 17 percent per year from 2016 onwards.
La Corona itself covered some 0.6 square kilometers (0.2 square miles) in 1998, but had shrunk down to such an extent that it was already on the verge of losing its glacier status in 2015. Commenting on the glacier’s demise, ULA researcher Luis Daniel Llambi told the Guardian that “our last expedition to the area was in December 2023 and we did observe that the glacier had lost some two hectares from the previous visit in 2019, [down from four hectares] to less than two hectares now.”
Also in December, the Venezuelan government arranged for the Humboldt glacier to be covered with a geotextile blanket in the hope of insulating and protecting it. Not only did the plan fail, but it has also drawn the ire of conservationists who say the ill-advised strategy could lead to ecosystem contamination as the fabric breaks down into microplastics over time.
“These microplastics are practically invisible, they end up in the soil and from there they go to crops, lagoons, into the air, so people will end up eating and breathing that,” says Centeno.
All in all, it’s a pretty tragic demise for a country that hosted cross-country skiing events as recently as the 1950s.
