Tropical glaciers in the Cordillera Real (Bolivia) are rapidly retreating.Ramírez and others (2001) predicted that many of its small glaciers (<0.5 km 2 ) would vanish within a few decades.More than two decades after this dire prediction, we evaluate their fate using a recently published, multi-temporal inventory of glaciers in the Cordillera Real.We identify 174 glaciers that disappeared between 1998 and 2024, more than five times the number previously reported.All of the glaciers that vanished were small, as predicted by Ramírez and others ( 2001), and most (79.9%) were low-lying (maximum elevation <5,400 m).These losses represent 30.5% of the total number of glaciers in the Cordillera Real in 1998, but their demise accounts for only 8.5% of the total area loss between 1998 and 2024.Although a majority (62.7%) of small glaciers persist to 2024, current and projected warming will likely threaten most of those that remain.
Malone et al. (2026) studied this question.