Retreat of the Tropics glaciers The Andes mountain range is a path unprecedented in the history of human civilization, finds a study published in a leading scientific journal. Science.
Measurements of rocks exposed by melting ice show that Andean glaciers are at their lowest level since the end of the last ice age, 11,700 years ago.
The researchers even say they were surprised by the findings: “We thought something like this was decades away,” said Andrew Gorin of Boston College, who led the study.
“It’s happening faster than even those of us who study it think.”
As Gori said, his team found it hard to believe the results until they were confirmed by analyzing more samples.
The study comes months after Venezuela, one of the Andean countries, became the first country in the world to be recognized. is losing all its glaciers due to climate change.
The findings in the Andes, home to 99% of the world’s tropical glaciers, paint ominous pictures of the future of glaciers in the rest of the planet, researchers said.
Andean glaciers are “like the canary in the mine,” Gorin said. “The same thing will happen everywhere soon, maybe sooner than we think.”
Until now, scientists believed that the world’s glaciers reached their minimum levels in the early to mid-Holocene, the geologic era that began with the end of the last ice age.
Research in science overturns this picture.
Researchers examined recently discovered rock samples around four glaciers and measured levels of two rare radioisotopes, beryllium-10 and carbon-14, produced when the rocks are bombarded with cosmic radiation from space.
Levels of the two isotopes were close to zero, meaning the rocks were covered by ice until recently.
“Glaciers are very sensitive to the climate system,” said Sean Marcotte of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a member of the research team.
“Looking at them, you can imagine what we might see in the future in other regions, like the western United States, in a scenario where there is no ice at all.”
The research comes at a time when global high temperature records are being broken due to climate change.