According to Mariana Cardenas, the last glacier in her home country of Venezuela is “hardly even a glacier anymore.” The thin sheet of ice on the face of Pico Humboldt (Humboldt’s Peak) is mere years from vanishing completely.
“The first time I got to the Humboldt’s Peak glacier, I sat on a rock and cried,” says Cardenas, a passionate lichenologist and graduate student in the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior graduate program who spent her early career years studying lichens in the post-glacial environments of northern South America. “When I kept going, it was with tears in my eyes because I was thinking, ‘The next time I come back, this glacier isn’t going to be here anymore.’”
Conducting fieldwork where glaciers once stood comes with an overwhelming sense of loss. And it’s extremely difficult to work in – climates near the equator and thousands of miles above sea level are harsh and unpredictable. The air is thin. The sun, blinding. Temperatures range from sub-zero to blood-boiling. “I kid you not, one day my rain pants started melting,” says Cardenas of the intense ultraviolet radiation.
But the ethereal beauty of the life emerging on these barren landscapes is enough to motivate Cardenas to return, season after season. She says hiking there “is like walking on the moon,” with volcanic rock stretching out in all directions. Cardenas has a looking glass and under it a strange alien world begins to emerge.