GLACIER MELTING IN PERU

Our country is home of almost seventy percent of the world's tropical glaciers which feed a great part of the rivers. For this reason, Perus eighteen mountain glaciers are critical to the region's water sources for drinking, irrigation and electricity. Then, we could be one of the first countries affected by the climate changes and the rising temperatures, which are the main causes of the glacier melting which started four decades ago. The process of melting glacier is perfectly normal, because as the glacier is melted; it must also be replaced by more snow and the process continues working in that way. However, over the past decades and the past century falling snow is not able to cope with melted ice, which causes that glacier melting to happen faster than it used to. Therefore, It is thought that the prime reason for this is sudden and rapid industrialization which in turn has caused global warming. Global warming is the rise in average global temperature that has happened over the last century. The Industrial Revolution is the main cause of this rise in the average temperature. The indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels has also resulted in extreme atmospheric pollution leading to this condition. Coal is continuously burnt in huge quantities for various reasons, such as electricity production. Deforestation has also increased to procure wood and make more space available for farming, resulting in an increase in carbon dioxide concentrations. All these pollutants help in trapping more heat in the earths atmosphere and the increasing of temperatures. A new study in the Journal of Glaciology shows that the glaciers in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range are melting so quickly that the water they supply to the arid region is being threatened 20-30 years earlier than expected. A research by Cesar Portocarrero, the Peruvian government's lead glacier scientist, shows the Cordillera Blanca has lost 30 percent of its glaciers since 1970.

These glaciers are extremely important because as mentioned before, if they disappear there will not be any more water. It would also affect agriculture, especially in areas that depend on water emanating from ice glaciers, energy supplies will be badly affected too. There would be an increment in the price of water and the most affected will be poor sector of the city. Apart from that, we could have other negative consequences such as avalanches, mudslides, flooding, therefore a higher number of victims. For example: In 1998, an unusual heavy rain accelerated the melting of snow Salcantay, which belongs to the Cordillera Vilcanota, causing an avalanche that destroyed the huge hydro electrical center of Machu Picchu in Cusco. Even though, Peru has taken some steps to sort out this issue, we lack resources needed to create more projects to conserve water, to improve irrigation, to build reservoirs and dams, among others. We believe that international help is needed, especially to monitor water flow from the glaciers. In conclusion, glaciers in the South American Andes are melting faster than many scientists predicted. Unluckily, some climate change experts estimate entire glaciers across the Andes will disappear in twenty years due to rising global temperatures, creating instability across the globe as they melt. We believe that this is an alarming situation which may cause a national crisis in Peru. We, as people and the government have to look after our glaciers because we depend on them. If we do nothing, the disappearance of Andean glaciers could lead to a social and economic disaster.