According to a recent report, Venezuela has lost its last remaining glacier after it shrank so much that scientists reclassified it as an ice field.
- Venezuela is the first country to have lost all its glaciers in modern times. The International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI) said that the South American nation’s only remaining glacier – the Humboldt, or La Corona, in the Andes – had become “too small to be classed as a glacier”.
- Venezuela had been home to six glaciers in the Sierra Nevada de Mérida mountain range. Five of the glaciers had disappeared by 2011, leaving just the Humboldt glacier, also known as La Corona, close to the country’s second highest mountain, Pico Humboldt.
- Now assessments have found the glacier melted much faster than expected, and had shrunk to an area of less than 2 hectares. As a result, its classification was downgraded from glacier to ice field.
- USGS scientists in Glacier National Park use the commonly accepted guideline of 0.1 square kilometers (about 25 acres) as the minimum size of a glacier. Below this size, ice is generally stagnant and does not have enough mass to move.
