Beyond Peaks: On the Rapid Retreat of Glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru

There is now ample evidence of a major retreat of most mountain glaciers during the last 100 years in response to widespread increases in temperature. In recent decades, the rate of glacial recession has increased tremendously.

Mountain glaciers supply moisture to mountain forests during thedry and warm seasons. With retreating mountain glaciers, the risk of forest fires increases, with a subsequent reduction of forested areas. Smaller glaciers and diminishing forests lead to the drying up of rivers downstream during the dry seasons. Precipitation will more often come as rain during the winterand wash away at once instead of being stored as snow and then melt in the dry summer season.

Ice Under Fire: Mountain Glaciers

Photographer Gary Braasch holding a 1932 photo of Broggi glacier near Huascaran in the Peruvian Andes, while rephotographing this receding glacier in 1999. Glaciers everywhere in the world (with a very few exceptions) have been shrinking throughout the 20th Century, a prime signal of rapid global warming. Loss of tropical glaciers is particularly rapid. This glacier, previously photographed by the Austrian Hans Kinzl, receded about one kilometer in 67 years.

Here is a series of other receding glaciers in "then and now" views
Glacier Ururashraju, at about 15,000 feet in Cordillera Blanca of Peru. Photographed in 1986 by Peruvian glaciologist Alcides Ames, whose studies and direction allowed Gary Braasch to rephotograph it in 1999.

Retreat of about 500 M. Ames studies confirms the very rapid deglaciation of the Cordillera Blanca, which is the most ice-covered mountain range in the tropics.