The mountain glaciers of the Andes in Peru are water reservoirs, environmental archives and climate buffers at the same time. But climate change is gnawing at them too. According to new data, half of Peru’s glaciers could have disappeared within the next 20 years. By 2100, only two mountain ranges will possibly have remains of ice at all. That would be fatal for the inhabitants of the Andean region, but also for other regions of South America.
Global warming is not only affecting Greenland, Antarctica and other polar regions – the glaciers in mountainous regions are melting around the world. The once mighty ice flows of many high mountain peaks have already been decimated and thinned out, where whole valleys used to be filled with ice, now all that remains is water and rubble. The mountains with the greatest glacier retreat include the Alps and the southern Andes.
Only two will last
Scientists working with Christian Yarlequé from the Peruvian National Institute for Glacier and Mountain Ecosystem Research (INAIGEM) are investigating how climate change affects the mountain glaciers of the Andes in Peru. For their study, they evaluated data from GPS sensors on site, as well as satellite data for the 18 mountain ranges of the Peruvian Cordillera. With the help of Amazon Web Services, the researchers then created models of glacier development, which also enabled them to forecast future trends.
The sobering result: within the next 20 years, half of the mountain glaciers in the Cordilleras will have disappeared. Some of these millennia-old ice surfaces will not even survive the next few years, as Yarlequé and his team have determined. By the end of this century, almost all the peaks of the Peruvian Andes will be ice-free. All that will remain is ice remnants in the mountain ranges of Huayhuash and the Cordillera Blanca in northern Peru. The researchers see this development as an indicator of what is in store for other regions of the Andes and South America. “What is happening here can tell us a lot about what will happen in similar regions and what consequences this will have in less climate-sensitive places,” says Yarlequé.
Effects as far as the Amazon region
The loss of the Andean glaciers could have serious consequences for the region, but also far beyond. Because the climatic conditions in Peru and the Andes also influence large-scale air currents and weather patterns that extend into the Amazon region. “What happens in the Amazon also depends on the warming in Peru,” explains Yarlequé. “The changes here will therefore be felt beyond Peru. When temperatures rise in the Andean valleys, wind and precipitation patterns change elsewhere as well. “
With the Andean glaciers, however, a valuable archive of environmental and climate history is also being lost. Because, like other mountain glaciers, the ice layers deposited over thousands of years on the peaks of the Andes have preserved valuable information from the past in their gas inclusions and their isotope distribution. The evaluation of such data can reveal, for example, how the climate fluctuated over centuries and millennia, but also when, for example, people began to release pollutants into the environment through mining, metalworking and other activities.
“The glaciers contain climate information that goes back 10,000 years,” says Yarlequé. “Scientists are now trying to collect as much data as they can while the glaciers are still halfway intact.” A project is already underway in which researchers are collecting ice cores from various mountains around the world and bringing them to Antarctica to use for the To preserve for posterity.
Cultural consequences
But the disappearance of the glaciers will also have significant consequences for the inhabitants of the Peruvian Andes. The ice caps on the mountain peaks are important climate buffers and water reservoirs for the regions in the valley. Without it, it becomes warmer and drier much faster in the lower elevations. Even now, people are sometimes forced to give up their traditional cultivation areas and methods and move to higher altitudes. “They have to keep their potato and sweet potato fields higher and higher and also drive the animals to greater heights,” explains Yarlequé. “But what happens when you can’t go any higher? What if one day there are no more glaciers to supply water? “
The Incas, who once ruled over the Andean region, have repeatedly adapted to changing environmental conditions in the course of their history. But the current changes could render many of the traditional techniques and solutions unusable. “People now have to find new crops because many varieties of potato no longer grow there. They need new sources of income and ways of production, ”says Yarlequé. “What is happening here is therefore more than just climate change – it is also cultural change triggered by climate change.”
Source: Amazon, INAIGEM