Venezuela has become the first country within the Andes Mountains to lose all its glaciers, as confirmed by NASA, after it revealed that the body of ice that was located on Humboldt Peak, almost 5 thousand meters above sea level, altitude, disappeared completely.
The South American nation had six glaciers until 1910. Together they covered an area of one thousand square kilometers (km2). Humboldt became the last of these bodies since 2009. It was located high in the Sierra Nevada de Mérida, a mountain range in the northern extension of the Andes Mountains of South America.
Despite its proximity to the equator, it had survived thanks to its altitude and the topography of the region. The icy mass earned its name by sitting on a slope at the base of Humboldt Peak, the second highest peak in Venezuela, only below Pico Bolívar. NASA explained that “glaciers in the tropics exist because of the cold, snowy climate found at high elevations.”
But the environmental conditions were not sufficient to preserve the Humboldt’s existence. The glacier had an area of 3 km2 in 1910. Experts calculated in 2015 that the width had decreased to 0.1 km2, equivalent to about 10 hectares.
So far this year, the frozen area had shrunk to barely cover a tenth of it. “Although there is no universally accepted size criterion that defines a glacier, scientists agree that an ice field of this size is stagnant, meaning it is too small to flow downslope under the pressure of its own weight. According to that definition, Venezuela is now free of glaciers,” NASA noted.
