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The Last Glacier of Venezuela | JSTOR Daily

Glaciers are retreating around the world. The Andes are no exception: in Venezuela, the ice has mostly already disappeared.

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The photo above is the Andean mountain Pico Bolívar in 1950 (right) and 2011 (left)

Glaciers are retreating around the world as the planet warms. In the Andes, they’ve been in retreat for more than a century, with recession, as geographers call it, speeding up in more recent years. This is “consistent with the expected impacts” of regional and global climate changes, write Carsten Braun and Maximiliano Bezada in their history of the disappearing glaciers in Venezuela.

In 2013, there were 300,000 to 400,000 such small glaciers here on Earth, comprising some 785,000 square kilometers of total area. As a point of comparison, the state of California is 423,970 square kilometers.

For the Andean nations, glacial retreat is “already impacting water supplies for human consumption, agriculture/irrigation, hydropower, mining operations, and ecosystems in a part of the world where precipitation is highly seasonable and variable.”