The last guardian of tropical glaciers

There is a man in Colombia who religiously climbs icy mountains over 4,500 meters high once a month.

He searches for his beacons embedded in the ice, pulls out the tape measure, and assesses the depth of the snow whether it's a blazing sun or a freezing storm.

He has been doing it for almost 20 years and plans to continue until his last day of work arrives.

This man is called Jorge Luis Ceballos and he is the only glaciologist in Colombia, a country that is home to some of the last tropical glaciers on the planet.

Ceballos is both the inventor of modern glaciology in this country and the last representative of his discipline.

For years he has carried out scientific, political, diplomatic and even anthropological work to achieve, for example, being the only scientist that the indigenous people allow to ascend the Cocuy glacier, which they consider a sacred and inviolable place.

He has also dealt with the guerrillas to be able to install weather stations in their territories —some guerrillas, he says, continue to cover their faces when they pass in front of them, mistakenly believing that they are cameras to identify them.

This geographer is also the greatest supporter and disseminator of glacier ice in Colombia.

Thanks to the collaboration with Spanish counterparts and from other countries, he has managed to give international visibility to the very rapid retreat of the Colombian ice.

He has also promoted programs to teach these topics to mountain guides —among whom he is looking for his unlikely successor—, and in rural schools in areas so rugged that some children take two hours on horseback to get to class from their homes in the mountains.

A few weeks ago, this newspaper accompanied Ceballos, a scientist from the Colombian Government's Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (Ideam), on one of his monthly journeys;

first in a hard ascent to his favorite glacier, the Conejeras, and then down the mountain, towards the schools.

At 59, Ceballos climbs the slopes with very long, slender legs without ever seeming to be affected by shortness of breath despite the altitude.

When he reaches a mark or just wants to rest for a while he drops to the ground immediately, whether it's on the grass or deep snow.

The greatest uncertainty for him now is whether the Conejeras glacier, located under the central peak of Nevado Santa Isabel, will have disappeared before it is his turn to retire in three years.

Most likely, he acknowledges, it is yes.

Why does it keep going up every month if you know that there is no remedy?

"Imagine that a friend tells you that he has six months to live," reasons Ceballos.

“You don't do the math and say: 'Ah, six months, in May you die, well I'll come to see you in May.'

No. From that very day you visit him and you are with him.

Well, it's the same with this glacier, ”he details.

On his last visit, last November, the patient seemed to have miraculously recovered.

The entire mountain was covered with snow, it was cold and foggy, and the ice of Conejeras seemed to extend beyond the horizon.

But it was all a mirage.

This glacier, the weakest in Colombia, has lost 90% of its extension since 1850. Its melting has accelerated alarmingly in recent decades.

Despite all this, what could make Ceballos the most angry is that one of his colleagues from Chile, Argentina or another country with much larger glaciers tell him the truth: that Conejeras is already a "glaciarete", which means that the ice it has stopped flowing down the slope and that, therefore, the glacier has already died.

The Conejeras glacier covered in snow last November. Nuño Domínguez

A native of Bogotá, Ceballos began exploring the mountains of his country as a young man, for pure pleasure.

He was going without any kind of preparation, coat or mountain equipment, hoping to find something with which to fire at heights of more than 4,500 meters, which was almost impossible.

He studied Geography and in 1995 began working at the newly created Ideam.

His mission was to study the impact of sea level rise due to climate change in coastal areas.

In those days there was a small group of geographers who studied the glaciers of Colombia.

“I saw them as astronauts;

they were doing a kind of science that seemed unattainable to me,” he recalls.

At the beginning of this century, those astronauts retired and Ceballos was commissioned to continue their work.

They gave him some notebooks with drawings and improvised plans that described how to get to the Santa Isabel, since not even that was clear.

The geographer began to follow the maps through muddy roads and to attend Pan-American congresses to understand how a glacier is monitored.

"I was very surprised;

Colombia was the most backward country, they were 10 years ahead of us, ”he recalls.

With the help of his counterparts in Latin America and Europe, Ceballos designed the first serious monitoring system for the Santa Isabel.

“One of the biggest challenges was getting the only ice drill in all of Colombia to install the beacons,” he recalls.

After a year of unsuccessful attempts in the cold, in 2006 he obtained the first reliable data.

"I had become an astronaut," sums up the geographer.

At that time, Ceballos made a decision that would mark the rest of his life.

He had to determine how often he would go up to measure the ice.

In Colombia there are no seasons and the climate depends above all on the altitude.

That, and the fact that he liked his work more and more, made it clear to him: "You have to measure every month," Ceballos told his boss.

No one since then has contradicted him and, every year, the scientist leads the official Ideam publication that certifies the state of Colombia's glaciers.

Although it seems a contradictory term, there are still dozens of tropical glaciers on Earth.

The vast majority are in the Andes, but at least three in Africa and one in Asia also resist.

Almost all the world's glaciers are receding, but the tropical ones are undoubtedly the most threatened.

Colombian glaciers are among the closest to the equator and, therefore, closer to disappearing.

In neighboring Venezuela, the Humboldt Glacier, the last in the country, has less than one hectare left.

It will probably be the first country in the Andes to lose all its glaciers.

The Colombian Santa Isabel does not exceed 5,000 meters of altitude.

This makes it difficult for the temperature to drop below zero and for the snow to stay frozen and turn to ice.

This year, Ceballos and his collaborators have recorded in real time the disappearance of two of the nine small glaciers that remained in this massif: Otún north and south.

"The snow that falls during storms only lasts a few hours or a few days, making accumulation almost impossible," explains geographer Yina Nocua, who collaborates with Ceballos in monitoring the country's glaciers.

Nocua would like to continue Ceballos' work once he has retired, but the reality is that there are not enough funds to hire her as permanent staff at Ideam.

"We are sure of the extinction of the Santa Isabel glacier in the short term," acknowledges Ceballos.

"By the end of this decade, the Conejeras sector will not exist, and at most another sector will remain, the Fungus, but very reduced," he details.

In the other five glaciers the situation is more uncertain because they accumulate more snow, although the forecasts are that they will have completely disappeared by the end of this century.

The mountain guide Janier Díaz takes measurements of the thickness of the snow on the Tolima glacier at an altitude of about 5,000 meters.ND

The Spanish geographer Nacho López-Moreno has been collaborating with Ceballos in the study of the last glaciers in Colombia since 2013. “When I saw his work I was fascinated.

I don't think there is another case in the whole world of such intense monitoring, with monthly measurements”, he acknowledges.

The rate of retreat of the Santa Isabel is much faster than in the Pyrenees, but so is the reconquest of the plants of the land gained from the ice.

As temperatures rise, the páramo ecosystem, characterized by a species of low palm trees crowned by leaves so soft they look like rabbit ears, gains ground lost to ice in record time that has not been observed in glaciers. northernmost, including the last remaining in Spain.

Colombia is also unique because there are still mountains that are forbidden to science.

The most spectacular is the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a wall of more than 5,700 meters of altitude that rises just a few tens of kilometers from the Caribbean coast of the north of the country.

Getting to its glaciers is practically impossible due to the difficulty of obtaining permits from the owners, many of them indigenous, to cross their lands.

Ceballos, who tried it years ago, recalls: “We spent a year and a half visiting the indigenous people and trying to convince them to let us go up the Santa Marta because it was essential to understand the future of the glacier due to climate change;

they listened to us, voted and decided no, ”he recalls.

The indigenous communities and the guerrillas also limit access to Huila, a volcano of more than 5,300 meters in the south of the country.

For many years, the U'wa indigenous also prohibited the ascent to the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy, another mass of ice considered sacred that houses peaks of more than 5,400 meters.

In 2016 a group of mountaineers recorded a video playing soccer on the ice.

The natives prohibited the passage to any expedition.

After lengthy negotiations with the community, Ceballos won permission to pass.

Currently he is the only scientist allowed access to the Cocuy.

Another large glacier in Colombia, the Nevado del Ruiz, has not been studied because it is too dangerous due to volcanic activity.

Francisco Rojas is a Colombian geographer who is doing his doctorate at the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology of the CSIC, in Zaragoza.

Before coming to Spain, he was one of Ceballos's students.

Colombia is a unique case in the world, ”he highlights.

“In countries like Ecuador there have been specific cases in which the indigenous people break the measuring stations because they blame them for adverse meteorological phenomena such as

but in no other place are there unexplored mountain ranges by scientists”, he adds.

Rojas believes that Colombia is "the perfect laboratory" to study the melting of glaciers, but the resources to do this type of science "are very limited," he acknowledges.

In 2010, Ceballos led the publication of a great collective book,

, which began with an inescapable quote from

: “Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía he would have to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to see ice”.

The truth is that after so many years going up and down mountains and getting to know its people, Ceballos is the best person to turn to to get to know the ice in the country of Gabriel García Márquez.

“When we were in Santa Marta, the indigenous people told us that they did not believe in climate change because it was an imperialist discourse created by the United States,” recalls the geographer.

“Opinions aside, that was a huge lesson for me.

It made me conceive the mountain in a different way.

Glaciers cannot be approached solely from a scientific point of view.

The natives have a different one.

They are Colombians, they have their territory and you have to respect it.

There is also the point of view of the climbers, who are frustrated because they cannot climb.

And then there is the vision of the common Colombian, for whom the Nevados [glaciers] are above all a landscape.

You have to see the happiness of a tourist when he reaches the edge of a glacier.

It is a happiness as if he were in Antarctica ”, highlights Ceballos.

The glaciologist Jorge Luis Ceballos, in one of the rural schools with which he collaborates teaching meteorology. Nuño Domínguez

For years, the geographer has been trying to involve the population in his work.

One of his projects is to teach students from humble nursery schools to monitor the weather with rain gauges, windsocks, and keep a daily record of temperatures.

He also often goes to the towns that surround the snow-capped mountains — as glaciers are called in Latin America — to give talks on climate change and mountaineering.

In 2019, after attending one of those conferences, Saida Martínez, 27, and Andrés Cruz, 24, both mountain guides, created the first collaborative ice monitoring network on Nevado de Tolima, a glacier located in the crater of the volcano that bears the same name and that continues to spew fetid gases to this day.

Some 60 people including mountain guides, farmers, muleteers and other local inhabitants participate in the project to collect snow and ice thickness data, which are then sent to Ideam.

One of its milestones was installing the highest tracking beacon in the country, at an altitude of 5,200 meters.

“My dream is to be the first Colombian glaciologist,” acknowledges Saida.

“I want to study for a master's degree, follow in the footsteps of Jorge Luis and reach those corners that have not yet been studied;

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