The death of a glacier
INTRODUCTION
Conejeras is gone
In September 2023, a single video from Jorge changed everything: where our glacier had been, there was now only bare rock. Conejeras was gone. Nina and I went back to Colombia one last time, to stand with our friends, to take the very final measurements, and to say goodbye.
Discover the expedition
The death of a glacier
After two successful field campaigns in Colombia, lending a hand to Jorge Luis Ceballos and to Cumbres Blancas Colombia, we weren't planning to go back any time soon. But everything changed in September 2023. Jorge had always been so generous about sharing the latest photos and videos of the Conejeras glacier with us, because he knew just how attached we had grown to it. Then, in September, a video arrived from him, and I had to do a double take. He was slowly panning across the landscape around him, standing exactly where our time-lapse camera was, but instead of the white expanse of the glacier, all we could see was a sea of bare rock. From one month to the next, between August and September 2023, Conejeras was gone. We were lost for words. Heartbroken. And even those words aren't enough to describe the pain we all felt. I cried for weeks, and I knew that what I really wanted was to be with my friends in Colombia, to mourn alongside them. So Nina Adjanin and I decided to go back one last time, to the Conejeras glacier.
Then we followed Jorge as he climbed to the very top of the glacier, at around 5,000 metres. When I finally caught up with him, I found him sitting quietly, gazing at the last ablation stake still standing in a small remaining patch of ice. My heart sank, and for a long while none of us said a word. Then, together with Gina, I took out the tape measure and we carried out what would turn out to be the very last measurements ever collected on the Conejeras glacier. It was such a sad and profound moment. And yet there was something precious in having been there together, Jorge, Gina and I, able to talk about how we felt, to put words to our emotions, to share the pain and the sadness. It was a chance to remind Jorge that every single measurement he has taken over all these years has made history, and has helped the world understand how these equatorial glaciers have been responding to human-made climate change. None of it was in vain. Thanks to him, none of us will ever look at tropical glaciers the same way again.
But the fieldwork was far from over. Jorge and his team had already begun a brand-new monitoring programme on a neighbouring glacier, a little higher up, called El Hongo, which drapes one of the nearby summits just above where we had installed that very first time-lapse camera. It took real effort to get up there, climbing higher and higher, and it's always so hard to keep up with Jorge and Gina, who move so nimbly through these mountains they have known their whole lives. Together, they quickly surveyed all the ablation stakes planted on El Hongo before the bad weather began to roll in. And Jorge told us how fast this glacier, too, had been changing, wondering aloud just how much longer all the ice clinging to the Santa Isabel massif really had left.
It was the very first time in my life that I had watched a glacier vanish so quickly. We had always known it wasn't a question of if, but of when, and yet none of us had expected Conejeras to be gone by 2023. And there we were, standing in front of a sea of rock, recovering the ablation stakes and the weather station, and documenting the very last puddles of ice scattered across the ground. What moved me most was being there not only with Jorge Luis Ceballos, who had devoted his whole life to studying this glacier, but also with the wonderful Gina, who is only at the very beginning of what we hope will be a long career in glaciology. I kept wondering what must be going through their minds: Jorge, watching something that had become almost a member of his family disappear, and Gina, watching the very thing she was starting her life as a glaciologist with melt away before her eyes.
We flew back from Colombia after this painfully short field campaign, heartbroken and beyond exhausted. Between the physical and the emotional exhaustion, I had nothing left to give. I spent a couple of days barely able to leave my hotel room, trying to gather enough energy to make it home, but also turning over and over in my mind all the images I was now carrying, and asking myself how on earth we can still fight the seemingly inevitable disappearance of Colombia's tropical glaciers. In the meantime, the wonderful Marcela and her team at Cumbres Blancas had organised a beautiful ceremony just outside Bogotá, alongside Indigenous communities and artists, to honour and commemorate everything this glacier had meant to us all. And perhaps that is one of the most important lessons of all. Glaciers don't truly vanish, they become the ocean, and their memory, along with everything they have given us, does not disappear either. It is up to us to understand just how much more fragile these glaciers may be than we ever imagined. I came home with a renewed fire inside me, determined to do everything I possibly can to study tropical glaciers, to equip local communities to study them too, and to keep telling the world their stories. Because Conejeras may now be physically gone, but its data, and the stories that Jorge, Gina and Marcela continue to tell, will live on forever.
