Exploring the tropical glaciers with Cumbres Blancas Colombia
THE TROPICAL GLACIERS OF COLOMBIA-2019
INTRODUCTION
The Last Tropical Glaciers of Colombia
In 2019, a single Instagram message pulled me to Colombia to stand on some of the last tropical glaciers on Earth, ice that is forecast to vanish within our lifetimes. What followed was two unforgettable weeks alongside the scientists, activists and Indigenous elders fighting to understand and protect it before it's gone.
Discover the expedition
THE TROPICAL GLACIERS OF COLOMBIA-2019
In early 2019 I was scrolling through my Instagram messages, not really paying attention, when I noticed something sitting in my request folder. It was a message from someone I'd never heard of, Marcela Fernández, writing from Colombia. She told me she'd recently fallen in love with her country's glaciers, and that along the way she'd realised these weren't just the "eternal snows" people in Colombia talk about, but actual equatorial glaciers, tropical ice high up in the mountains of a country most people would never picture having glaciers at all. She'd become really attached to them and felt a bit helpless about how to protect them. There was only one glaciologist in the whole country studying this ice, and hardly any budget to do it. Marcela wanted to change that. Her idea was to start something much bigger, a project to look after these glaciers and get people in Colombia to care about them before they were gone, and she'd come across my name in a documentary series I'd worked on. She asked if I'd come out to Colombia to see it for myself and help draw some attention to why the place mattered. I didn't take long to say yes. I was googling Colombian mountains within minutes, and a few months later I'd put a team together joined by the talented scientist Nina Adjanin and brilliant photographer Antoine Kremer, found a bit of funding, and landed in Bogotá, where Marcela and her team from her newly created NGO Cumbres Blancas Colombia were there to pick us up. We spent that first night in a Kogi community, sitting with the elders to ask their permission, and their blessing, to head up to the glaciers they've looked after for generations.
The goal of this first Colombian expedition was simple: to help Jorge Ceballos with his work. We'd join him on his monthly visits to the glaciers of Santa Isabel and El Cocuy, and we also planned to install a few time-lapse cameras for the French company Enlaps, so the glaciers could be monitored passively, quietly gathering images even during the long stretches when no scientist is able to reach them. But before any of that, before we set foot on the ice, we had some time in Bogotá with Marcela and her team. She had co-organised a big event to pull the press and the media together and turn some real attention onto tropical glaciers, bringing in some of the largest companies and foundations in the country. It was a wonderful chance to speak up about why these glaciers matter, and it was also where I really got to know Marcela, and to see for myself what an extraordinary force she is, someone genuinely willing to move heaven and earth for the glaciers of Colombia.
After a couple of days in the city, it was finally time for our first Colombian glaciers. We were lucky with the timing, too. It was the very end of the wet season, early November, and the conditions were about as good as they get. We made our way to Los Nevados National Park and spent several days inside it, and honestly I could hardly believe our luck at being there with such a group: Jorge Luis Ceballos himself, along with Marcela, Estefanía and their team from Cumbres Blancas, and the park rangers who came with us too. Walking into the park was extraordinary. You start down in this lush, dripping forest, and then you climb, higher and higher, watching the landscape shift with every stage of altitude, until you're camping at around 4,000 metres and the world has completely changed around you. Getting to know the mountain like that, layer by layer, was something I'll never forget.
Several pictures from Antoine Kremer.
By the time Marcela's message landed, I'd already been dreaming of a project on tropical glaciers for years. It went all the way back to 2015, when I climbed Kilimanjaro with my brother and stood next to tropical ice for the first time. So getting her message felt like serendipity, Because here's the thing about tropical glaciers: South America holds the largest cluster of them anywhere on Earth. More than 99% of the world's tropical glaciers are shared between just eight countries — Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela. Some of them, like the highest glaciers in Peru, might just hang on until the end of this century. Colombia's won't. They're forecast to disappear within our lifetimes. In Colombia the ice sits in three mountain ranges, each one inside a national park: Los Nevados, the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy, and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, I've listed them in order of how easy they are to reach. And every last one of them is monitored by a single man, the Colombian glaciologist Jorge Luis Ceballos, an all-round incredible human who works for IDEAM, the country's Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies.
We got ourselves acclimatised as fast as we could, spending our first day helping the team maintain weather stations up in the páramo, around the volcano Nevado del Ruiz, which was still fairly active at the time. Every now and then it would let out a little puff, a small reminder that we were standing close to a living, breathing volcano, which was equal parts thrilling and terrifying. What an incredible day that was to understand the páramos: these remarkable wetlands that sit just below the glaciers. They're extraordinary carbon sinks, treasure troves of biodiversity and medicinal plants, and they act like giant sponges, storing the water from the melting ice and the rainfall, filtering it, and slowly releasing it to the communities and the small subsistence farms further down the valleys. They were some of the most beautiful ecosystems I've ever laid eyes on. The sheer variety of colours, shapes and sizes was just staggering.
Several pictures from Antoine Kremer.
The next day, we were finally judged fit enough to head above 4,000 metres and spend some time with Jorge at one of the very first glaciers he ever studied, a glacier that, thanks to him, has since become one of the most closely and most frequently studied on the planet: Conejeras. It clings to the summit of Nevado Santa Isabel. Being there was a genuinely humbling moment, standing beside the man who has given his whole life to the glaciers of Colombia, and getting to know this little glacier for myself, tucked into its beautiful cirque high on the mountain. Between the altitude and the sheer beauty of the place, it was a moment I'll never forget. But we didn't have long to stand around in awe. Pretty quickly we turned our attention to the work that had to be done: measuring the glacier's mass balance. That meant surveying every ablation stake across the ice, reading how much snow had built up over the wet season, so we could get a picture of the glacier's health before the hot, dry season set in.
Several pictures from Antoine Kremer.
One of our own small contributions to Jorge's work was to bring along two time-lapse cameras, one to set up beside the Conejeras glacier and another to install in a different mountain range. It was wonderful to work on this with Jorge and his team, who built a really sturdy tripod to make absolutely sure the ENLAPS camera wouldn't budge. ENALPS has been such a generous partner of mine over the past several years. Thanks to them and their PlanetWatch programme, we've been able to install time-lapse cameras on glaciers all over the world and monitor them at very high frequency, capturing an image every hour of daylight for months, and sometimes even years, at a time. So we felt genuinely grateful to be able to donate one of these cameras to Jorge, Cumbres Blancas and their teams, to help them get an even clearer picture of just how fast these glaciers are retreating.
Several pictures from Antoine Kremer.
Installing the first time-lapse camera went smoothly, and it gave us real confidence that we could pull this off again with the second one, this time on a completely different mountain range. So from Los Nevados National Park we travelled on to Manizales, and from there we set our sights on the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy. What a magnificent range it turned out to be, breathtakingly beautiful. We spent a few days there setting up our second time-lapse camera, and we were struck by how much bigger the glaciers were than the ones in Los Nevados, and by the lakes that had formed in the spaces the ice had left behind as it retreated. It felt like exactly the right place to put a second camera, somewhere genuinely off the beaten path.
Several pictures from Antoine Kremer.
Now all we can do is hope that the cameras behave themselves, and that the glaciers hold their ground. I want to thank Cumbres Blancas, Jorge and his whole team for what was an unforgettable journey to Colombia. Very rarely in my life have I witnessed such motivation and dedication for glaciers. I also want to thank the Mamos, the elders of the Indigenous communities, for their knowledge, for their deep understanding of climate change, and for their blessing to visit their sacred glaciers and sacred mountains. A huge thank you to Nina Adjanin, Antoine Kremer for joining this incredible adventure. I truly believe their good wishes carried us through those two weeks. And to end the expedition in the best possible way, Cumbres Blancas pulled out all the stops once again and organised a tree-planting day, gathering hundreds of us in one of the páramos further down the mountains. Since we know that deforestation and the drying out of these mountains directly affects the glaciers above, it felt like one of the finest gifts we could give back to nature before heading home.
Several pictures from Antoine Kremer.
