MÉRIDA, Venezuela- José Betancourt, 75, climbed to the glacier of Pico Bolívar, Venezuela’s highest peak, 158 times before it disappeared in 2017. He’s also summited the nearby Pico Humboldt, the country’s second-highest peak, more than 100 times. At 4,925 meters (16,158 feet), Humboldt still has a glacier — for now. In 2023, scientists demoted the […]
  • In 2023, La Corona, Venezuela’s last standing glacier in the Sierra Nevada de Mérida National Park, was reclassified as an ice field, having shrunk to the size of barely two football fields.
  • The country is now the first tropical nation to lose all of its glaciers, which melted rapidly due to a combination of warming temperatures, reduced rainfall and ineffective policies since early signs of melting appeared in the late 19th century.
  • As Venezuela’s symbolic glaciers began melting one after another, a team of researchers started studying not only their disappearance, but the emerging ecosystems that were taking over the formerly icy areas.
  • With the ice gone, the city of Mérida, advertised for decades as the “city of eternal snow,” is now having to reinvent its identity and its tourism industry.

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