Peru, Glacier Loss And Economic & Political Destabilization - 22% Of Andean Glaciers Gone In 35 Yrs.

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Its ice is melting, but the majesty of Huascarán Mountain hasn’t diminished. Peru’s tallest mountain, its white peak still pierces the clouds on an overcast day in the Cordillera Blanca, part of the Andes range that stretches through Peru’s northwest department of Ancash. Communities in the Cordillera Blanca still revere Huascarán for its beauty and the water it provides that allows them to survive in Peru’s extreme terrain, far from Lima and often beyond the reach of government services.

But over the last 20 years, they’ve watched Huascarán’s glacier start to disappear, the ice giving way to more black rock year after year. “It used to take you two or three hours walking to reach the ice. But now you have to walk five, six hours to reach ice,” said Maximo Juan Malpaso Carranza, a farmer in Utupampa, a small community high in the Cordillera Blanca, as he installed a water pipe beneath the village’s dirt road to bring water from Huascarán to 105 houses. “We all get water from there. That’s where the water source is,” he said, pointing to Huascarán. “But if the ice disappears, there won’t be any more water.”

Peru has lost 22 percent of its glaciers over the last 35 years, according to the Peruvian Ministry of Environment. Research by César Portocarrero, the Peruvian government’s lead glacier scientist, shows the Cordillera Blanca, which is home to one-quarter of the world’s tropical glaciers, has lost 30 percent of its glaciers since 1970. Parts of the Central Andes, the mountain range that supplies many of Peru’s coastal cities with water, have lost more 60 percent of their glaciers in the last 40 years. “We know some glaciers could disappear in 20 years. We know this,” Portocarrero said.

The impact of glacier melt extends beyond the Andes. More than 2 million people, stretching from the Andes to the coastal cities, get their drinking water and irrigation from rivers fed by glacier runoff from Cordillera Blanca, according to Portocarrero’s studies. The secondary impacts of glacier melt will affect many more.

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http://global-warning.org/main/peru/2/