Peru's shrinking glaciers spark fears of water crisis
Peru’s White Mountain Range may soon have to change its name because rising temperatures are fast melting the ice atop Cordillera Blanca, the largest glacier chain in the tropics, and peaks are turning brown.
The trend is highlighting fears of global warming and, scientists say, endangering future water supplies to the arid coast where most Peruvians live.
Glaciologists consider the health of the world’s glaciers an indicator of global warming and they warn that what is happening in the Andes signals trouble ahead.
“To me it’s the rate of ice loss that’s a real concern,” because when melting accelerates, the ice cannot replenish itself, said Lonnie Thompson, a leading glacier expert at Ohio State University.
Thompson, a geologist monitoring glacier retreat on the Andes, Himalayas and Kilimanjaro, said tropical glaciers were melting all over the world because of rising temperatures “and where we have the data to prove it, the rate of ice loss is actually accelerating”.
Quelccaya in southern Peru, the world’s largest tropical ice cap, is retreating at about 200 feet a year, up from 20 feet a year in the 1960s, Thompson said.
Melting is also visible in the other Andean countries, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.
In Peru, home to 70% of Earth’s tropical glaciers, the Andes mountains have lost at least 22% of their glacier area since 1970 and the melt is speeding up, according to Peru’s National Resources Institute (Inrena), a government agency.
Rock shows through lavishly snow-covered mountains throughout the Peruvian Andes. The Broggi glacier has disappeared altogether and ice caves once popular with tourists are gone.
Meanwhile, the melt is causing long-term fears of a water shortage.
Glaciers feed the rivers that feed the sprawling cities and shantytowns on Peru’s bone-dry Pacific coast. They also serve agriculture and hydroelectric plants that generate 70% of the country’s power.
Two-thirds of Peru’s 27 million people live on the coast, where just 1.8% of the nation’s water supply is found. Shanty towns spring up virtually overnight in the steep, sandy dunes around the capital, Lima, and providing them with water is extremely costly, says Julio Garcia of the National Environment Council.
President Alan Garcia believes the rush of melted water could provide abundant hydroelectric energy to Peru and its neighbours, and Garcia agrees it is feasible, but does not think the water bonanza will last beyond 2050.
Farmers growing potatoes, wheat and artichokes say they depend entirely on the glacier run-off from the Cordillera Blanca during the dry season, and on rainfall during the wet season.
“There’s less now, not like before,” Claudia Villafan Ramos, a farm worker, said of the snows atop the mountain in her native Santa River valley. She said it meant fewer jobs and “there is nothing to eat”.
