On thin ice: vanishing glacier ‘signals advance of global warming’

A VANISHING glacier in the Andes has provided one of the strongest signals so far that global warming is underway and changing the Earth’s climate, a leading scientist warned yesterday.

The Qori Kalis glacier is part of the Quelccaya Ice Cap, the largest body of ice in the tropics. According to glaciologist, Professor Lonnie Thompson, from Ohio State University in the US, it could be gone within five years.

The glacier is just one of many in Peru and other mountainous regions around the world that are rapidly melting away. Since 1974, Prof Thompson has been to the Quelccaya ice cap on at least 27 occasions to drill for core samples.

Evidence from the ice cores indicates that the Andes ice is retreating faster than at any time in at least the last 50 centuries.

The melting ice had formed a massively deep lake at the glacier’s margin, presenting a real danger to people living in the region, Prof Thompson told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Last March, a huge chunk of the glacier broke off, tumbling downhill and splashing into the lake. A wall of water poured over the natural dam that had till then contained the lake, and cascaded into the valley.

Such events would not have happened before 1991 because the lake did not exist then, said Prof Thompson.

He added: “You see this unfolding also in the Himalayas where you have the retreat of glaciers and the formation of high-altitude lakes. Now the people in the valleys below face a new geological hazard.

“These glaciers are going to be gone. If you are living at the base of one of these mountains, it doesn’t matter why they’re disappearing — only that they are.”

In 2001, Prof Thompson predicted the famed “snows of Kilimanjaro” in Tanzania would vanish in 15 years as its glaciers surrender to the warming climate. He now believes that forecast may have been too conservative.