The Andes are losing their glaciers

 

This shouldn't be news, because the world is getting warmer due primarily to human emissions of greenhouse gases. Effects of this are everywhere, but one of the most obvious, as well as sad, disheartening, and worrisome, is the melting of glacial ice. This isn't just for the snow for show, as in beautiful and unique scenery -- this also has consequences of water resources for millions of people.

Though for a few weeks I haven't battled with climate change skeptics and deniers on Twitter (hard for me to call it X), I'm going to return. It's hard for these chaps to deny that glaciers are melting, but they both make up reasons for that happening that reduce the involvement of humanity, while at the same time claiming it really isn't important.

Wrong on both counts, but they specialize in being wrong.

So, moving forward, here are the results of a new study, analyzing Andean glaciers (that's the mountain range in western South America, if you're not sure), as many of them are tropical, meaning between the Tropics of Cancer (about 23 degrees North) and Capricorn (23 degrees South). That means they are icy where Earth is warm, and thus they are rare. And also, they are prone to the effects of warming at altitude, where they are. All of which means they're melting.

And the study shows that they're melting more than they have for a long time.

Tropical Glaciers in the Andes Are the Smallest They’ve Been in 11,700 Years
Four different glaciers along the Andes range no longer have hospitable conditions.

"After studying rare chemicals called beryllium-10 and carbon-14 in bedrock—like the ones in the samples Mateo collected—researchers found that these bedrock locations in the Andes had never been without glacier cover for at least 11,700 years. As such, these tropical glaciers are now smaller than they’ve ever been since the dawn of human civilization."

Slowly disappearing