Nothing remains of the Ayoloco glacier, its tongues and its funnel. Only a wall of old ice and scratches on the rocks remind him that he was here, at 4,700 meters, near the top of the Iztaccíhuatl volcano, in central Mexico. The streaks left by this fierce 200-meter-thick ice mass are still palpable. As if it were a bulldozer, it dragged the stone as it passed, down the slope, to leave it piled up, mixed with the mud. To the rocky, brown and huge masses, that he could not move, he covered and scratched them with the force of thousands of years in motion.
In one of those ancient furrows, two researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) are now toiling, in the middle of a snowstorm, to place a metal plate. They cover it with glue and secure it with screws. They don't want it to fall in the next storm. "The plaque reminds us that the Ayoloco was here," explains glaciologist Hugo Delgado, "and that it receded until it disappeared in 2018 due to climatological reasons forced by human activity." This geologist, who has devoted his career to studying Mexican glaciers, insists that measures should have been taken long ago. Now the disappearance of this water source is irremediable. Ice-free slopes and scattered bone-like stones are the only things left by the glaciers that occupied the high mountains of Mexico.
The Ayoloco has been the last to become extinct in Iztaccíhuatl, the third highest peak in the country, with 5,230 meters of altitude. In this mountain in the shape of a sleeping woman, 11 glaciers were counted in the 1958 monitoring, now only three remain: the Pecho, the Panza and the Suroriental. Between all, they barely reach 0.2 square kilometers. They reached 6.23 kilometers in 1850, the last period of splendor left by the so-called Little Ice Age. In 170 years, the mountain has lost 95% of its glacial mass.
In the rest of Mexico, only two other perennial ice masses remain: the North Glacier and the small North-West Glacier, which add up to just over 0.6 square kilometers. They are in the Pico de Orizaba, also called Citlaltépetl, on the border of the State of Puebla with Veracruz. It is the highest mountain in the country, at 5,675 meters, and in the last 60 years four glaciers have disappeared. The North, the geologists' last hope of study, is also dying. It has lost its tongues, the eight tentacles of ice that snaked up the mountain. “The rock is already emerging. The thickness of the ice is minimal ”, says Delgado, director until this April of the Institute of Geophysics of the UNAM.
The outlook is critical for the last five Mexican glaciers.
The geologist predicts that in the next five years the three from Iztaccíhuatl will have disappeared and grants a margin of two decades for those from Pico de Orizaba.
Either way, he ends: "In 2050 there will be no glaciers in Mexico."
But the countdown has not started only here.
Delgado, who represents the country in the international glacier research group, says that during all these years he has endured the affectionate jokes of his Latin American colleagues, who are proud of the magnificent glaciers of Ecuador or Peru.
"You won't even have to come at all," they told me before, laughing, "he says.
"They have gone from making fun of the size of my glaciers to now worrying about their own by watching the ice melt between their hands."
This dramatic and accelerated extinction is repeated in the ice masses around the planet. Funerals range from the Ok in Iceland to the Pizol in Austria, from the requiem announced for Spanish glaciers to the formation of lakes in the Himalayas. None escape global warming. Glaciers have become one of the most obvious sensors of climate change: the more the temperature rises on the planet, the faster they recede. His continued disappearance is a mirror of the world to which we are headed. Hotter, drier, more exhausted.
You can hear the crunching footsteps on the ground, the heavy breathing and the pounding of the zacatones, which cover the Iztaccíhuatl skirt like a blanket. After each slope, the vegetation languishes and reveals the rock. In a clearing, before reaching the snow, the crosses are nailed by Luis Rosas, a mountaineer who died in 1971, and by Daniel Peralta who died in 2013 after climbing many paths. It is these plaques in memory of mountain lovers that have inspired the farewell to Ayoloco.
The silence of the road suddenly melts into a low rumble, a constant hum. "Do you hear it? It is a gas leak, with a lot of pressure. There are also some explosions. It is Popocatepetl ”, says excitedly Robin Campion, a volcanologist from UNAM, who accompanies Delgado on his glaciological expeditions. From the foot of the Iztaccíhuatl, as in an insistent reminder of its presence, the fumarole of the other imposing volcano is clearly outlined in the clear May sky.
Popocatepetl also housed glaciers until 2000, when a strong eruption buried them.
“There is still some ice left, but it does not function as a glacier because it has no movement or feeding process.
In fact, these ice masses, ironically, are being conserved by the volcano's ashes ”, explains Hugo Delgado.
If one day the Popocatepetl ceased its activity and the increase in temperature had not melted them, those ice could regenerate the glacier.
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A Salvadoran woman with her son in her arms surrenders to the agents after crossing the border from Miguel Alemán City, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
Migrant families descend from an inflatable boat in the riverbed of the Bravo, in the area of Roma, Texas.
A family is led by elements of the border patrol.
In some parts of the Rio Grande Valley, migrant families walk up to five kilometers before surrendering to immigration agents.
A father holds his son while the rest of his family descends from an inflatable boat.
The thick blanket of clouds accompanies the mountaineers on the ascent until it covers the feet, the knees, and the belly of the Iztaccíhuatl. On the western slope, on the way to Ayoloco, appears the hole that the Atzintli glacier occupied until about 2012. Now the lizards hide between its moraine and the lichens cover these rocks at 4,500 meters of height. But it was not always like this. For centuries both glaciers were an important source of water during the dry season. Their names in Nahuatl, heart of water and my water, reveal the link they had with the population that lived on this side of the mountain.
The two glaciers disappeared when the temperature increased and they each remained below the so-called equilibrium line. Geologists thus define the high mountain area where the average annual temperature is zero degrees or less. Above this line, snow, blizzard or hail remains and nourishes the glacier. “As it feeds, it moves downhill due to gravity. When it exceeds the equilibrium line, it reaches what we know as the loss zone ”, Delgado details. That is where the temperature is greater than zero degrees and, therefore, everything that falls ends up melting. "Glaciers have this dynamic of feeding and loss and there is a balance that allows them to conserve the mass or lose it," adds the glaciologist.
This line of balance has moved naturally over time. For example, all the mountains of the Valley of Mexico of more than 3,500 meters were covered with ice: the Ajusco, the Sierra de la Cruces, the Nevado de Toluca or the mountains of the Sierra Nevada sheltered glaciers. The concern has been aroused in recent decades, when the accelerated increase in temperature has caused this average of zero degrees to be higher and higher. In 1958, it could be found in Mexico at 4,500 meters; it is now at 5,250.
All the glaciers in Iztaccíhuatl are already below the equilibrium line. "This means that solid precipitation has no hope of staying," explains Delgado. While the researchers secure the Ayoloco plaque, the snow falls hard on the belly of the mountain. The rainy season has just started, and at this altitude the storm drops flakes incessantly. They still fail to cover the broad brown glades. “The snow doesn't last more than a few days, hopefully weeks. But it is not maintained, it cannot feed the glaciers ”. The three that remain in the Iztaccihuatl remain crouched inside the craters; the hollow protects the body from ice. "They are maintained by geomorphological conditions, but the hope that they will remain is practically nil." The verdict: "They should no longer be."
The situation is different for Pico de Orizaba. The summit and its glaciers are still 120 meters above the balance line. But geologists have detected a lack of synchronization: when it snows in the rainy season - which in Mexico coincides with the summer - high temperatures prevent the snow from remaining. And when it is cold enough, there is no precipitation. "If things continue with the same temperature records in a couple of decades they will disappear," he says.
In addition to warming on a global scale, Mexican glaciers try to survive surrounded by the industrial zones of the Valley of Mexico and Puebla, of overpopulated cities such as Mexico City or Nezahualcóyotl. And like a whiting biting its tail, they fight a local effect: as the glacial ice melts, the dark rock of the mountain appears, absorbing it instead of reflecting solar radiation, causing additional warming. .
The only glaciological station that allows monitoring these frozen masses, located in the Pico de Orizaba, —the Iztaccíhuatl ones lasted just a couple of months, on one occasion it was destroyed by lightning, and on another, someone stole its materials—, it also corroborated that the ice of Mexico is "hot ice." Its temperature is so close to zero degrees, that just by rising a little, the ice can melt. In addition, due to their altitude and orientation, in dry seasons, although temperatures are low, glaciers suffer such solar radiation that the ice sublimates, goes from a solid to a gaseous state, and evaporates.
Hugo Delgado, who climbed Iztaccíhuatl in 1974 to learn to walk on the snow, who climbed the magnificent Ayoloco funnel with hammer and ice ax, who in 1979 lived in these seven kilometers of mountains for 15 days to prepare for an expedition in the Himalayas , who lost his best friend on that mission, who has traveled this mountain so many times, one hundred, 200, he does not know, that he knows it as a friend, thus sums up the condition of the Mexican glaciers: “Our ice is heroic, they are resisting all they can ”.
The irremediable extinction of the Mexican glaciers, unique in their latitude of 20º north, means losing an unambiguous sensor on climate change, but above all it implies losing a water source. In an increasingly populated and drier country —the average temperature in Mexico has increased two degrees in the last 34 years— glaciers are an additional contribution in the dry season to communities living near the mountains. They cooperate with around 5% of water to the regional hydrological system, by runoff or by feeding the aquifers. "It is very little, but even so it will cease to exist," insists Delgado.
All the signs — the retreating glaciers, the melting poles, the emptying dams — point in the same direction: “There will no longer be so much water availability. Our society will be under a water stress scheme. It is a problem that is already here, but it has not yet manifested itself in all its magnitude. The real challenge now is how we are going to adapt ”.
There is no hope for these frozen masses that agonize on the mountain tops, nor can global warming be reversed, warns the glaciologist, but it is possible to try to stop.
Reducing greenhouse gases, saving water, avoiding deforestation, investing in environmental education are some of the actions already necessary.
Delgado, who sees hope in the next generations, concludes: “This is not to protect the planet, but to protect the environment that allows us to survive as a species.
We are risking permanence ”.
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Credits
Text: Beatriz Guillén
Video, photography and audiovisual editing: Teresa de Miguel
Infographic: Luis Sevillano and JA Álvarez
Design - Front End: Alfredo García
Development: Ivan Mendoza
