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What could happen to other glaciers in the world is already inevitable here. Keeping track of the last tropical glaciers is the mission of Dr. Heïdi Sevestre and his team. With her phone, she takes us to Colombia…
Heïdi Sevestre is a glaciologist and in charge of the “The Last Tropical Glaciers” project. She and her team have one goal: to keep track of the last tropical glaciers. “Two years ago, I’m pretty sure this is where we walked on the ice. Look what’s left… Just piles of rocks, mud“, she laments. According to the glaciologist, the Alps, the Himalayas or even Alaska could suffer the same fate.
Heïdi Sevestre took us with her to several tropical glaciers. This allowed him to film the clues that attest to the melting of these glaciers. If only in two years, Heïdi sees how much everything has deteriorated. Thanks to new technologies such as drones, she and her team can observe the evolution of glaciers and “what’s left of them”. For one of them, the results are terrible: “It melted so much that there are rivers everywhere, it even split in two. This is the reality of tropical glaciers, which disappear.”
For Heidi, there are not an infinity of solutions: for these tropical glaciers to continue to exist, their temperature limit is + 1°C. However, since the 1880s, this temperature has been increasing. “We have already reached the point of no return for all these small tropical glaciers and it is directly linked to climate change, which is directly linked to human activities“, concludes Heidi.