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Hardy Scientists Trek to Venezuela's Last Glacier Amid Chaos

Associated Press

   Editor's note: Heroic efforts to revive ecosystems and save species are
   being waged worldwide, aimed at reversing some of humankind's most
   destructive effects on the planet. "What Can Be Saved?," a weekly AP
   series, chronicles the ordinary people and scientists fighting for
   change against enormous odds -- and forging paths that others may
   follow.

   MERIDA, Venezuela -Blackouts shut off the refrigerators where the
   scientists keep their lab samples. Gas shortages mean they sometimes
   have to work from home. They even reuse sheets of paper to record field
   data because fresh supplies are so scarce.

   As their country falls apart, a hardy team of scientists in Venezuela
   is determined to transcend the political and economic turmoil to record
   what happens as the country's last glacier vanishes.

   Temperatures are warming faster at the Earth's higher elevations than
   in lowlands, and scientists predict that the glacier -- an ice sheet in
   the Andes Mountains -- could be gone within two decades.

   "If we left and came back in 20 years, we would have missed it," says
   Luis Daniel Llambi, a mountain ecologist at the University of the Andes
   in Merida.

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