By Paula Bayarte |
Lima, (EFE).- Open the faucet and nothing comes out. That is the near future that communities that paradoxically live under the shadow of a glacier are going to face, according to experts, as well as people who live in urban areas and who, although they do not know it, depend on water from the enormous masses of ice that is melting rapidly in the Peruvian mountain ranges.
“Glaciers provide water to the main cities of the mountains and the coast. As the mass of ice decreases, there will be less water supply, the lagoons will lower their level and there will also be greater pressure due to the increase in people in the future that will require more water resources, but the glaciers will no longer provide this well”, explains the expert Wilmer Sánchez to EFE.
He relates with concern that tropical glaciers are constantly melting due to their location close to the tropics, which makes them more sensitive to rising temperatures and other climate changes.
In Peru, 70% of this type of glaciers in the world are found and experts point out that they are disappearing at an alarming rate: in the last 50 years, 40% of the tropical glacier mass has already disappeared in the country.
To illustrate this problem, its numerous environmental effects and the consequences for the populations in the Andean country, the award-winning project “Chasing Glaciers” was born in 2018.
Through documentaries filmed in various Peruvian mountain ranges, the young Mark Gregory and Roberto Ramírez show the magic of the country’s white peaks, but, above all, they focus on the dramatic situation in which they find themselves.
“It’s beautiful, majestic, when you’re up there. The glacier looks like a living being, ”Gregory, an American, told EFE, who came to Peru to study these ice masses but quickly realized that the problem was much bigger than he imagined.
“When researching the Huaytapallana glacier (in the central highlands of Huancayo), I saw that it is going to disappear in about 15 years, and that there were many glaciers that were going to disappear in the next 100. I also saw the water problems. I could not show this problem only in a paper that was going to remain in the academic community”, he tells about how the idea came about.
Together with Ramírez and experts like Sánchez, they have ascended peaks to demonstrate to the public that these great sources of water are not eternal and that they are damaged by human activity.
Contaminated water
“The Huaytapallana recharges 30% of the drinking water of the communities throughout the year, so, in the dry season there is no water. There are already people who do not have access to water for days and have to use balloons to survive and this is going to be a reality in many places”, indicates Gregory.
“Water is a good that many people here lack and we wanted to see how to help in that sense,” said Ramírez, indicating that experts are needed to help communities take advantage of this resource, in addition to greater interest on the part of the authorities.
In addition to the scarcity, there is concern about the quality of the water that reaches nearby communities, which sometimes contains rock acid.
Sánchez describes that, when the glaciers melt, they are exposing the rock that contains them, which is highly toxic, since it contains different ferrous acids from different heavy metals.
Thus, “the rock acid is being drained, which reaches the lagoons and flows through the streams towards cities, crop fields, from which animals drink and finally reaches humans through the ingestion of food that has been irrigated with this water.”
A sustainable solution, they explain, is the implantation of vegetation such as wetlands that naturally filter this water with an orange hue and make it suitable for irrigation.
Reforestation around the glaciers could delay their melting, but for these solutions it is necessary to increase the interest of the population and authorities.
The danger of black carbon for glaciers
In addition to the increase in global temperatures that cause melting, there is a human factor that is accelerating this process: black carbon, which is the accumulation of carbon monoxide and other components that form spots of this color in the middle of the white surfaces of ice. .
Sánchez has spent years studying the impact of these solid particles generated mainly in the combustion of fossils such as gasoline and forest fires in the Amazon.
“Once (these particles) are emitted, they rise into the atmosphere in warm air due to the dynamics of the winds and are transported to the upper atmosphere and reach glaciers,” he points out, adding that in his research, focused on the Cordillera Blanca , prove through sampling that the glaciers closest to cities and with the highest concentration of black carbon are melting faster.
According to the National Institute for Research on Glaciers and Mountain Ecosystems, glaciers that are below 5,000 meters are at risk of disappearing in the next 100 years, so this future does not seem distant.
