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Global Warming Claims Another Glacier in Peru
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by An American in Lima | February 14, 2009 at 06:27 pm
298 views | 12 Recommendations | 2 comments
Bald & ugly: not a patch of ice is left on Nevado Quilca, in Puno, south Peru
Awful news. Quilca Glacier (5,250 meters above sea level) in Puno has disappeared completely, reports Peru’s National Institute for Natural Resources (IRENA).
The disappearance of Quilca is part of an ongoing recession of tropical glaciers throughout the Andes, where climate change (mainly rising air temperatures) is making it impossible for the ice to regenerate.
Experts such as Marco Zapata, of IRENA, predict that no glaciers will be left in Peru by 2025.
Please do the math. That’s 16 years away.
Why should people care that tropical glaciers are melting in this Andean country? The reasons are both local and global.
First, Peru derives 80% of its water for drinking, agriculture and hydropower from glacier melt-off. A major drought is looming, and no large-scale strategy to find and use other water sources has been implemented.
Uh oh.
“No water, no life,” as the llama herders on Mount Ausangate, in southern Peru, told me in September ‘08.
Secondly, the loss of glacier meltoff will have a devastating effect on the Amazon region, which is fed by streams that originate in the Andes. Two years ago, NASA pinpointed the origin of the Amazon River itself at snow-capped Mount Mismi, in southern Peru, and was predicting major impacts by 2050:
Tracing the origin of the Amazon river back to a glacier highlights the vulnerability of the river system to climate change. Glaciers and snowmelt in the Andes are the source for as much as 50 percent of the water in the upper Amazon, yet global warming puts these at risk: the Peruvian government estimates that the country’s glaciers have shrunk by more than 20% in the past 30 years… Further downstream, models show that climate change, combined with deforestation, will leave the Amazon rainforest considerably drier by 2050, further impacting water availability in the river basin.
Given that Amazon rainforest produces 20% of the earth’s oxygen, the depletion of its meltwater sources is catastrophic news for everyone on the planet.
Please share this information with anyone you know who (1) drinks water; (2) breathes oxygen; and (3) gives a damn about the people who will be alive in 2025 or 2050.
--Barbara R. Drake (first published on An American in Lima, Jan. 26, 2009)
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (2)
at 19:00 on February 14th, 2009
I just hate stories like this where what we once had is now gone and we can't get it back no matter what we do.
(I like your story however, just the subject matter is awful!)
at 06:41 on February 15th, 2009
Yes, it is tragic. Glaciers can recede for years but if they are robust enough and climate conditions reverse, they can grow back again. However, if they recede past a certain point,they can never regenerate. These glaciers are doomed, and Quilca is just one of hundreds of tropical glaciers that are on their last legs, so to speak, in the Andes and the Himalayas.
One of the things that interests me about glacier recession is how the phenomenon affects us -- human onlookers. Many of have never seen a glacier up close, but nevertheless, images of dying and disappeared glaciers can affect us strongly. That phrase "the eternal snows" registers deep in the human psyche in a symbolic way -- the image of something beautiful and high and eternal, scraping the heavens. When those images vanish, we feel bereft or sad or angry.
There is a philospher, Glenn Albrecht, who has termed a term for the emotional distress that people experience when their landscapes are altered by climate change. He calls it "solastalgia," a type of "psychoterratic illness."
He describes solastalgia as "the pain or sickness caused by the loss of comfort/solace connected to the present state of one's home environment. Solastalgia exists when there is recogniton that the place where one resides and that one loves is under assault (physical desolation)....Solastalgia is a form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at 'home.' "
See: "What Does Climate Change Do to Our Heads?"