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CLIMATEWIRE | Slovenia and Venezuela are the first two countries to lose their last-standing glaciers in a period of climate change induced by people — but they won’t be the last.
Some news outlets reported this month that Venezuela might be the first country in modern times to lose all of its glaciers. However, researchers told E&E News that Slovenia likely claimed the solemn title more than three decades ago.
“The two glacial remnants have not moved, [and] there were no glacial crevasses observed in the last few decades — these characteristics define real glaciers,” Miha Pavšek, who leads ice measurements at Slovenia’s Triglav mountain and Skuta peak with the Anton Melik Geographical Institute, told E&E News.
Melting glaciers are one of the iconic consequences of human-caused climate change, and even Arctic countries like Iceland have lost whole glaciers. But Slovenia and Venezuela appear to be the first countries since the 18th century to lose their last glaciers. It comes as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects 18 to 36 percent of global glacial mass to be lost across the 21st century, due in large part to global warming.
A May post on X, formerly Twitter, by climatologist Maximiliano Herrera drew attention to the decline of La Corona — Venezuela’s last glacier — by citing December measurements from the Universidad de Los Andes showing a remaining area of 0.02 square kilometers.
“The disappearance of all the glaciers in Venezuela is a national tragedy,” Julio César Centeno, a professor at Universidad de Los Andes who studied the glaciers, told E&E News in an email. “It is a warning sign about the avalanche of additional effects that are coming to the country in the short term as a consequence of global warming.”
But Slovenia and Venezuela likely lost their last glaciers years earlier.
There’s no universally accepted point of death for a glacier, and no international organization is recognized as the authority on glacial classification. But Centeno said that “the minimum size for a glacier is 0.1 [square kilometers.]” The United States Geological Survey also uses that threshold and says it’s “the commonly accepted guideline.”
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Triglav, Slovenia. Simonkr/Getty Images
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