Bidding farewell to Venezuela’s last glaciers

It all started back in 2012. At the time I had lived in Mérida (Venezuela) for almost 30 years, first as a student and then as a professor at Universidad de Los Andes. When I arrived, two glaciers could be seen from the city standing guard high in the Sierra Nevada, at near 5,000 meters, stubbornly white below the scorching tropical sun; one more was hidden behind the high peaks but tourists taking the cable car could easily spot it, in Humboldt peak. I distinctly remember the morning back in 1990 when an enormous fissure split in two the smallest of them, La Concha (the Shell), and how quickly it disappeared afterwards. It was sad and overwhelming, and it was also clear that the other white mass, at Bolívar peak, would follow suit. Nobody could at the time imagine the Sierra without its white shrouds, not here in the so-called City of Eternal Snows. People would hope that next rainy season would recover them, it was just unthinkable for anyone to lose them.

Anyone, that is, except Andrés Yarzábal, a microbiologist at the university. “There is life inside that ice, a unique microbiota in each glacier”, he told me, “and we have to study it before it disappears forever”. I had no idea. To me, a glacier was a sterile mass of ice, but then, I was just a theoretical physicist that only recently had become fascinated by biology. The idea that each glacier contained unknown organisms, living a slow, tough life for thousands of years inside the ice, and that all that was very soon coming to an end, was mind-blowing.