委内瑞拉成为安第斯山脉首个失去所有冰川的国家
High in the misty peaks of the Sierra Nevada de Mérida, what was once a glistening crown of ice has now faded into memory. Venezuela’s Humboldt Glacier—the country’s last—was formally reclassified as a stationary ice field by scientists in 2024, marking the South American nation as the first in the Andes to lose all its glaciers. The glacier had clung to the slopes of Pico Humboldt for millennia, but rising temperatures sealed its fate faster than any major model had predicted.
For much of the 20th century, the Humboldt Glacier spread over roughly three square kilometers, feeding cold streams that trickled into the valleys below. By 2011, it had shrunk to less than 0.1 square kilometers, a tenth of its size from just a few decades earlier. Glaciologists who trekked to its 4,800-meter perch in recent years found only a few hectares of fractured, motionless ice. Without the mass to flow under its own weight, it could no longer meet the definition of a glacier, prompting the formal downgrade.
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