Bolivian Scientists Send Balloons 30 Km Into the Sky to Track Greenhouse Gases Over the Andes

Scientists from Bolivia's Universidad Mayor de San Andrés have sent stratospheric balloons to 30 kilometers above the Oruro Altiplano — well beyond the ceiling of any commercial aircraft — collecting the kind of greenhouse gas data that could sharpen the atmospheric transport models driving global climate policy. For a country watching its Andean glaciers retreat at mounting speed, the readings do something more concrete: they establish a baseline to track how fast the atmosphere above South America's high plateau is actually changing.

How the Balloons Work — and Why the Altiplano Is the Right Place

Each launch follows a deliberate sequence. A helium balloon lifts the AirCore sampling instrument skyward until the growing pressure differential at peak altitude causes the balloon to burst. What follows is the data-collection phase: the AirCore — a long coiled stainless-steel tube, open at one end and sealed at the other — descends under a parachute while rising atmospheric pressure forces ambient air to flow passively into the tube. Each layer of the atmosphere deposits a distinct parcel of air at a different position inside the tube, producing an ordered, unbroken record from near-stratospheric heights all the way down to the surface. Once recovered, the device is taken to a laboratory in Oruro where a continuous analyzer reads out concentrations of CO₂, methane, and carbon monoxide across every altitude sampled.

No satellite or ground-based sensor can replicate this type of measurement at equivalent resolution. The Oruro Altiplano's broad, flat terrain is central to the method's success: the open plains south of Oruro offer a wide, accessible landing zone within recovery range before the air samples inside the tube begin to degrade — something that rugged mountain terrain or dense vegetation would make impossible. The region has now hosted the campaign on three separate occasions for exactly this reason.

A Franco-Bolivian Partnership Built for International Standards

The campaign is a joint operation between UMSA's Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics (LFA) and France's Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement (LSCE), with additional support from the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD). The collaboration links Bolivia to a European-calibrated research network that deploys AirCore instruments in France and Canada under a shared measurement protocol — a setup that makes the Bolivian data directly comparable with readings gathered at other points in the global monitoring network.

Researcher Laura Ticona, who led the campaign's scientific and technical direction, is currently completing her doctorate at the LSCE in France. Her binational grounding means the Oruro dataset meets European validation standards without requiring foreign personnel for ground-level deployment. The campaign opened October 6, 2026 and ran for 12 days, with French specialists providing remote support while Bolivian nationals carried out all fieldwork.

Young Bolivian Women Are Driving the Science Forward

A defining characteristic of this third campaign was the makeup of the team on the ground. Red Uno reported that scientists and students of Bolivian nationality composed nearly the entire crew, with several young women from the university standing out as central figures in both fieldwork and scientific operations — a tangible shift in who Bolivia puts in the field to study its own atmosphere.

LFA director Marcos Andrade, who oversees Bolivia's highest GAW station at Chacaltaya — the Global Atmosphere Watch facility confirmed as the world's highest at 5,240 meters above sea level — also participated in the campaign, lending institutional continuity to a research program that has grown steadily under his direction.

Three Gases, Three Scientific Stories

Each of the gases the AirCore measures reveals something distinct about the atmosphere. CO₂ and methane, the dominant anthropogenic greenhouse gases, trace how surface-level emissions travel upward through the troposphere and into the stratosphere — data essential for validating the atmospheric transport models that feed into IPCC climate projections. Carbon monoxide tells a different story: it functions as a combustion marker, allowing researchers to identify the source of pollution events and distinguish Amazon wildfire plumes from industrial emissions or agricultural burning across the continent.

Bolivia's geographic position amplifies the value of these readings. The Andean plateau sits at an elevation that bridges low-tropospheric pollution corridors and the free troposphere, where air masses travel across entire ocean basins. Measurements taken here can untangle signals from multiple continental sources — a separation that sea-level monitoring stations simply cannot achieve.

A Larger Ambition: Bolivia as a Global Atmospheric Observatory

The balloon program is one arm of a broader institutional drive by UMSA to anchor Bolivia permanently within global climate monitoring. Simultaneously, the LFA is pursuing Chacaltaya's integration into ACTRIS — the Aerosol, Clouds and Trace Gases Research Infrastructure, Europe's leading atmospheric science network — a process that would open Bolivia's high-altitude data to international peer review and the wider scientific community. In late April 2026, a 14-member delegation of scientists from Europe and the United States traveled to Chacaltaya to assess the station's readiness for membership.

Should that bid succeed, the stratospheric balloon data gathered south of Oruro and the continuous sensor readings running year-round at Chacaltaya would function together as a vertically integrated atmospheric observatory spanning the full Andean column — from the plateau surface to the lower stratosphere — one that climate science increasingly cannot do without.

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