Peruvian glacier is not all it's cracked up to be

AUGUST 2, 2004
By GREGORY J. RUMMO

HUARAZ, PERU

          HUARAZ IS THE shining star of the Callejon de Huaylas (Canyon of the Mountains) in the Ancash region of Peru. From almost any vantage point in the city, there are spectacular views of the Andes mountains including Huascaran, Peru’s highest peak at 22,205 feet.

          The village is a bustling center of commerce where you can buy anything, from flowers and food to handmade chullos and blankets. But it is also a confluence of the old and the new with first-class European restaurants like Bistro de los Andes and Internet cafés on virtually every street corner. The blend provides a happy medium for the thousands of tourists who come here to spend time acclimatizing in the thin air—it’s over 10,000 feet—before departing on a trek or an alpine summit through the mountains. 

          This tourism in combination with the local culture creates an atmosphere described as “full of energy, diversity, and enjoyment unlike any other region in Perú.”

          But in April, 2003, something ominous was discovered in one of the glaciers above this village of over 100,000 that, if proven to be what some scientists claim, could put a damper on the festive spirit and possibly result in a huge loss of life.

          NASA announced its Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer was monitoring what appeared to be an “ominous crack” in a glacier feeding into Lake Palcacocha. “Should the large glacier chunk break off and fall into the lake, the ensuing flood could hurtle down the Cojup Valley into the Rio Santa Valley below, reaching Huaraz…in less than 15 minutes.  

When we arrived in Huaraz a year ago, I was warned that Americans suddenly weren’t the Peruvian's favorite tourists. We are viewed by much of the Third World as wealthy capitalists (and by their standards, we are.) This, coupled with our reputation as the world's largest consumers of fossil fuels, automatically brands us as the culprits behind global warming which was undoubtedly the direct cause of the crack in the glacier or so the logic went.

This year we were again reminded of the impending disaster during an acclimatization hike up to a high point overlooking the city where a breathtaking vista of the Cordillera Blanca, including the Cojup Valley spread out before us to the east. 

          But to blame Americans or even global warming turns out to be not only historically inaccurate but premature.

In the Peruvian Andes, since 1702, there have been more than 22 catastrophic events resulting from ice avalanches that have caused outburst floods from glacier lakes, according to the United States Geological Survey. The USGS explains these floods, known in Perú as aluviónes, “come with little or no warning and are composed of liquid mud that generally transports large rock boulders and blocks of ice. The floods have destroyed a number of towns, and many lives have been lost.”

Gregory J. Rummo Huascaran, Peru’s highest mountain at 22,205 feet was the site of a devastating aluvione in 1970 that buried the village of Yungay, killing 18,000 people.

The most serious aluviónes destroyed part of the city of Huaraz in 1725 and 1941. There were also two destructive “high-speed avalanches from the summit area of Huascarán Norte (6,655 m asl) in 1962 and 1970 that destroyed several villages and caused the deaths of more than 25,000 inhabitants.”

          The Greening Earth Society in its July 28, 2004 newsletter asks the question: “Are glaciers, ice caps, and sea ice melting worldwide because human industrial activity is causing global warming? Geologic history says otherwise.”

     “Ice ages have come and gone for millennia in the absence of greenhouse gases being produced by human industrial activity. In the Northern Hemisphere, for example, a Medieval Warm Period (800–1300 A.D.) gave way to a Little Ice Age (1300–1900 A.D.), from which we began to emerge only a century ago. The temperature and ecosystem changes the warming and cooling periods triggered are vastly greater than anything observed in recent decades.”

          The cover story of the July 2004 National Geographic sheds light on who, or more accurately what, is to blame: The Sun.         

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“Sunspot activity has indeed been high over the past century as Earth’s temperatures have climbed…” The writer was quick to site a recent NASA report that states the “greater luminosity [of the sun] seems to account for only half of the global temperature increase…” But NASA’s hedging use of the phrase “seems to account” is telling, especially in this context where they seem to have an agenda predicated more on opinion than the cold, hard facts of science. 

          If greater sunspot activity is responsible for the observed warming of the earth’s surface, there’s little we can do about it.

          But waiting for the next Little Ice Age doesn’t help the people of Huaraz where one good shake of the earth’s mantle may be all it takes to wipe out half of their city in the time it takes you to digest this column.

         Or maybe not. Another group of scientists with the Tropical Glaciology Group at Innsbruck University has undertaken its own analysis of the satellite images. After careful re-examination, they believe the “ominous crack” is nothing more than a rock step in the glacier that has appeared due to the thinning of the ice.

The group has concluded that NASA’s warning was “a regrettable miss-interpretation of the images which has not only caused worry and panic among the approximately 100,000 inhabitants of Huaraz, but has also caused a major economic damage to the local tourism industry...” n

Gregory J. Rummo is an author and syndicated columnist. In July, 2004 he trekked through the Cordillera Negra in Peru's Andes Mountains. Contact him through his website, www.GregRummo.com.