Why 1,600 years of ice melting in 25 years is a bad omen

Ice that took 1,600 years to form in the Peruvian Andes took only 25 years to disappear, according to a new study published in Science.

Lonnie G. Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, studied plants that had been recently exposed near Quelccaya, the world's largest tropical ice sheet, located 18,000 feet above sea level. Analysis of the plants showed that the ice cap is smaller than it has been for six thousand years.

Ultimately, Thompson was able to figure out that 1,600 years worth of ice had melted in less than three decades. The culprit? Global warming, scientists told the New York Times:

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The glacier is melting so quickly, Thompson tells The Daily Mail, that he has had to archive some of the ice "at -30ºC so that creative people will have access to it 20 years from now, using instruments and techniques that don't even exist today."

That Peru's glaciers are melting isn't a surprise. Public Radio International published a story last year about a team of scientists who are doing everything — from covering ice in sawdust, to painting black rocks white to deflect heat — to slow the melting of Peru's glaciers. According to glaciologist Benjamin Morales, the glaciers have lost at least 25 percent of their ice.

The melting of the glaciers could have a dramatic impact on Peruvians. According to Reuters, the "coastal region west of the Andes range, home to two-thirds of Peru's population and 80 percent of economic activity, receives just 2 percent of the country's fresh water." Many people in the dry regions of Peru depend on the glaciers for fresh water, which is so scarce that the country is considering a $500 million project to drill a 12-mile tunnel through the Andes to bring in water from the Amazon basin.

"How much time do we have before 50 percent of Lima's or La Paz's water resources are gone?" researcher Douglas R. Hardy asks the New York Times.

Sadly, there probably isn't enough sawdust to cover all the mountains in the Andes.