With the disappearance of its last glacier, Venezuela has achieved a grave stage in the fight against climate change—it is the first country to lose all of its ice bodies. The nation, which had six glaciers when founded in 1910, now has ice shards that don’t even remotely resemble glaciers.
Five of Venezuela’s glaciers have disappeared by 2011, with the Humboldt glacier, also called La Corona, the only one still surviving in the Sierra Nevada National Park. Even La Corona, formerly wide, has receded to the point where it is now considered an ice field. “In Venezuela, there are no more glaciers,” bemoaned University of the Andes (ULA) professor Julio Cesar Centeno. We have an ice fragment shrunk to 0.4% of its initial size.
Once spanning 4.5 square kilometres, La Corona now barely covers 0.02 square kilometres, falling short of the minimum requirement to be a glacier. Research spanning the last five decades indicates a staggering 98 percent decline in glacial coverage between 1953 and 2019, with the rate of ice loss accelerating notably after 1998, peaking at around 17 percent annually from 2016 onwards.
The shrinking of La Corona has been evident over the years, with observations revealing its steady decline. Luis Daniel Llambi, a researcher at ULA, noted the glacier’s significant reduction, stating, “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.”
The Venezuelan government’s efforts to protect the Humboldt Glacier with a geotextile blanket have failed, raising concerns among conservationists regarding potential ecosystem contamination from the fabric’s breakdown into microplastics.
Professor Centeno underlined the dangers posed by microplastics, alerting us to their widespread and invisible presence in the environment, which eventually affects human health, water bodies, and agriculture. The catastrophic decline of Venezuela’s glaciers highlights the severe consequences of climate change on natural environments in a country that used to host winter sports competitions in the middle of the 20th century.
The Venezuelan glaciers are a stark warning that immediate global action is required to lessen the effects of climate change and protect the planet’s natural treasures.