Peru: Glacier could be gone in five years

The principal glacier of the world’s biggest tropical ice cap could disappear within five years as a result of global warming, one of the world’s leading glaciologists predicted yesterday.
The imminent demise of the Qori Kalis glacier, the main component of the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes, offered the starkest evidence yet of the effects of climate change, according to Lonnie Thompson, of Ohio State University.

Although scientists had known for decades that Qori Kalis and the other Quelccaya glaciers were melting, new observations indicated that the rate of retreat was increasing, Professor Thompson said.
The Quelccaya ice cap, covering 44sq km in the Cordillera Oriental region, is the world’s largest tropical ice mass. Qori Kalis, its biggest glacier, has receded by at least 1.1km since 1963, when the first formal measurements were made from aerial photographs. The rate of retreat has increased: between 1963 and 1978, it shrank by 6m a year; now the rate is 60m a year.

Professor Thompson predicted six years ago that the snows of Kilimanjaro would be gone from Africa’s highest mountain by 2015, and he now thinks that that estimate might have been too conservative.

“Tropical glaciers are the canaries in the coalmine for our global climate system, as they integrate and respond to most of the key climatological variables – temperature, precipitation, cloudiness, humidity and radiation,” Professor Thompson said.

The Australian