Venezuela Now First Nation in Americas To Lose All Glaciers

Venezuela has no more glaciers, now that the last remaining one has been recently classified as too small to qualify.

The country, once home to six, is the first country in the Americas to lose all of its glaciers.

Thawing has been getting increasingly worse during the last decade in the Andes, which stretch across Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. This can mean terrible consequences for communities living on their slopes that depend on the glaciers for water, energy, and food production.

Five of the glaciers had largely melted away by 2011, since so much of the ice sheets formed in winter were lost in the other seasons, until very little ice formed at all. Recent satellite images show slightly less than 5 acres of the last glacier, Humboldt, left. Glaciers, as defined by the U.S. Geological Service, are at least 25 acres in size.

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