Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumIntrepid scientists witness final days of Venezuelan glacier
MERIDA, Venezuela (AP) Blackouts shut off the refrigerators where the scientists keep their lab samples. Gas shortages mean they sometimes have to work from home. They even reuse sheets of paper to record field data because fresh supplies are so scarce.
As their country falls apart, a hardy team of scientists in Venezuela is determined to transcend the political and economic turmoil to record what happens as the countrys last glacier vanishes.
Temperatures are warming faster at the Earths higher elevations than in lowlands, and scientists predict that the glacier an ice sheet in the Andes Mountains could be gone within two decades.
Restoring landscapes and species in a world damaged by climate change. Explore AP's in-depth series: What Can Be Saved?
If we left and came back in 20 years, we would have missed it, says Luis Daniel Llambí, a mountain ecologist at the University of the Andes in Mérida.
Scientists say Venezuela will be the first country in South America to lose all its glaciers.
Throughout history, glaciers have waxed and waned numerous times. But the rapid pace of glacial retreat over the past century and a half, accelerated by human activities and the burning of fossil fuels, creates a new urgency and opportunity for scientists to understand how freshly exposed rock forms new soil and eventually new ecosystems.
https://www.apnews.com/3d4291063089460d9f32d87482f1364c
N_E_1 for Tennis
(9,593 posts)Most things that are named Humboldt are named after this guy...
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2019/0719/A-naturalist-figured-out-climate-change-in-1799.-The-world-forgot-him
Few people today remember Alexander von Humboldt, but the Prussian naturalist predicted climate change back in the early 19th century. Hes the forgotten father of environmentalism, says historian Andrea Wulf.
During Humboldts travels through Venezuela in 1799, he noticed that farmers in the Aragua valley were deforesting the region to grow indigo. As a result, the nearby lake was drying up. Later, in a letter to President Thomas Jefferson dated June 1804, he wrote, The wants and restless activity of large communities of men gradually despoil the face of the Earth.
It was one of the first Western observations of human-caused climate change, according to Wulf. Environmentalists and scientists like Charles Darwin, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau were heavily influenced by his writings, which were widely read during his lifetime. Wulf wanted to raise Humboldts profile for todays readers. So she wrote The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, a lush and meticulously illustrated history of his South American expedition.