Peru has lost more than half of its glacier surface in the last six decades and 175 glaciers have disappeared due to climate change between 2016 and 2020, Peruvian scientists said this Wednesday.
“In 58 years, 56.22% of the glacial coverage recorded in 1962 has been lost,” said Mayra Mejía, a researcher at the National Research Institute on Glaciers and Mountain Ecosystems (Inaigem) of Peru, the state organization that studies glaciers. .
The factor that had the greatest impact was the increase in global average temperature, causing an accelerated retreat of glaciers, especially those in tropical areas, said the director of glacier research at Inaigem, Jesús Gómez, to the Associated Press news agency.
The South American country still preserves 1,050 square kilometers of glacier coverage, a surface that represents around 44% of that recorded in 1962, when the first glacier inventory was carried out.
Mejía, an expert in glaciology, said that there are some mountain ranges in Peru where glaciers have almost disappeared, such as Cerro Chila, which has lost 99% of its glacial surface since 1962.
The glaciers of Chila are fundamental because it is in this area where the first water courses originate that give rise to the Amazon, the longest river in the world.
The president of Inaigem, Beatriz Fuentealva, said that the loss of glaciers increases the risks for people who live in low-lying areas.
Fuentealva recalled that in 1970 a huge block of ice on the Huascarán hill, in the northern Andes, broke after a 7.9 magnitude earthquake, impacted a lagoon and caused a mud avalanche that destroyed the city of Yungay and It caused more than 20,000 deaths. dead.
The president of neighboring Chile, Gabriel Boric, and the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, plan to travel to Antarctica until Saturday to verify the “deadly impact of the climate crisis,” the Portuguese official revealed today.
The two leaders will visit the Collins Glacier and Kopaitic Island.
“I want to see with my own eyes the deadly impact of the climate crisis,” said Guterres.
World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas warned last week that rising temperatures will lead to an increase in extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods, melting glaciers, rising oceans and acidification.
Source: TSF
