Cordillera de Mérida
The Cordillera de Mérida (German: Cordillera of Mérida) comprises a series of mountain peaks and massifs in northwest Venezuela . The Cordillera de Mérida is a northeastern branch of the Andes . It spreads on the southwestern border of Venezuela with Colombia (Colombia's northeastern border), to the coast of Venezuela. The Táchira Trench separates the Cordillera de Mérida from the Cordillera Oriental .
The mountain range is located in the following states of Venezuela: Táchira, Mérida , Barinas , Trujillo , Portuguesa and Lara . The southeastern foothills are traversed by tributaries of the Orinocos , the northwestern foothills are traversed by rivers that flow into Lake Maracaibo . At the northeastern tip of the massif are the city of Barquisimeto and the sources of the Cojedes River.
In the center of the massif is the city of Mérida . In the north of the city lies the Sierra de la Culata and in the south the Sierra Nevada de Mérida . At 4,981 meters, Pico Bolívar is the highest peak in Venezuela.
Most of the peaks are covered by forest, the highest peak is at 3100 meters above the tree line. Within the massif is the protected area of Sierra Nevada National Park .
Since the Mérida glaciation - a series of glacier advances in the late Pleistocene - there may have been continuous glaciers in the Cordillera Mérida. In their second phase, after the maximum of the last glacial , they covered an area of approx. 600 km². A glacier retreat occurred about 8000 years ago. Under drier and warmer conditions, glaciers probably only survived on the highest peaks. During the Little Ice Age , the equilibrium line of the glaciers of the Sierra Nevada de Mérida sank again by a few hundred meters.
Along with the rise in air temperature, in the Cordillera Mérida, as in other regions of the tropical Andes, there has been a significant glacier retreat since at least the 19th century . At the beginning of the last century the area covered by glaciers was around 10 km². In 1991 there were still five glaciers in Venezuela, all of them in the Sierra Nevada de Mérida. Since 2008 only the Humboldt Glacier has remained . In 2017 it had a size of less than 0.1 km². It is expected to disappear in the next few years. Venezuela will then be the first Andean country without a glacier.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nathan D. Stansell et al. a .: Proglacial lake sediment records reveal Holocene climate changes in the Venezuelan Andes . In: Quaternary Science Reviews . January 2014, doi : 10.1016 / j.quascirev.2014.01.021 ( columbia.edu [PDF]).
- ↑ PJ Polissar et al. a .: Solar modulation of Little Ice Age climate in the tropical Andes . In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . June 2006, doi : 10.1073 / pnas.0603118103 . }
- ↑ Carsten brown and Maximiliano Bezada: The History and Disappearance of Glaciers in Venezuela . In: Journal of Latin American Geography . January 2013, doi : 10.1353 / lag.2013.0 .
- ↑ José L. Lozán and Dieter Kasang: 4. Mountain Glacier - 4.10 Glaciers of South America . In: José L. Lozán, Hartmut Graßl, Dieter Kasang, Dirk Notz and Heidi Escher-Vetter (eds.): Warning signal climate: The ice of the earth (= warning signals . Volume 16 ). 2015 ( uni-hamburg.de [PDF]).