If you compare historical photos of glaciers with those taken more recently, you can see that where there was formerly ice, there is now very often nothing but rock. Geographers, however, are less interested in the area covered by a glacier, and more interested in its mass. Researchers from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have now investigated all glacial areas in South America in more detail than ever before, from the tropical areas of Venezuela to the subpolar regions of Tierra del Fuego. Their two major findings are that the highest rate of mass loss is in the Patagonian ice sheet, and that the glaciers in the tropics have lost considerably less mass than previously projected, although this is not the good news which it might appear at first sight.