South American glaciers--going, going, gone

Marcela Valente in IPS: South America is perhaps most often associated with the Amazon jungle, the world's largest tropical rainforest. But along its western edge, from Ecuador to southern Chile and Argentina, it also harbours huge glaciers which are rapidly melting due to global warming.

The 18,000-year-old Chacaltaya glacier in the Bolivian Andes disappeared in August. Experts had forecast that it would survive until 2015, but it melted sooner than predicted, and what used to be famed as the world's highest ski run, 5,300 metres above sea level, is now a boulder-strewn slope with a few patches of ice near the top.

In Ecuador, an avalanche at the base of the Cayambe glacier killed three tourists and a mountain guide this year. And in May, an avalanche caused serious damage in the area of Pampa Linda, at the base of Monte Tronador (Thundering Mountain) in southern Argentina, when a glacier collapsed.

These isolated avalanches confirm the trend towards the collapse of the Andean glaciers, experts say.

"Glaciers in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia have their days numbered," Juan Carlos Villalonga, head of the Argentine chapter of the global environmental watchdog Greenpeace, told IPS. The ice sheets in Cuyo, in western Argentina, and the even larger ice sheets of Patagonia, shared between Argentina and Chile in the southwest of the continent, are also shrinking.

…In an interview with IPS, glaciologist Ricardo Villalba of the Argentine Institute of Snow Research, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences (IANIGLA) said that the retreat of the glaciers' enormous ice masses "is a global process which began in 1850 and has accelerated since 1970."…

A chalet at the Chacaltaya glacier, shot by Vico ricab, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License