Once upon a time, the easiest way for a visitor to touch ice  in Peru was to climb the tourist trail to Pastoruri Glacier, a flat-topped glacier 70 km south of Huaraz. Roads from the highway made the glacier easily accessible to daytrippers, and even though its peak is a staggering 5,200 meters above sea level, the trek upward is relatively gentle, as far as glaciers go. If things got really rough, you could always rent a burro or a horse in the parking lot and haul yourself up that way.

Not now. No longer.

There are no burros for hire at Pastoruri because the glacier is officially off-limits to tourists and nearly everyone else, except for glaciologists and the lone film crew or two. The glacier has receded so dramatically over the last 25 years, it’s on a death watch. Glaciologists like Marco Zapata (below) won’t say exactly when Pastoruri will bite the dust, but the glacier’s demise is around the corner. 

The numbers tell the story. Between 1980 and 1990, Pastoruri was receding at a rate of 12.7 meters per year, says Zapata. The following decade, that rate almost doubled to 22 to 23 meters per year.  The glacier has dwindled so much, it thinned into two tiny ice masses in 2007 and has been formally downgraded to an “ice cap.”  It’s a sad fate for what was formerly once of the most visited sites in the Cordillera Blanca mountain chain.  Within our lifetime, we will probably see Pastoruri become a puddle.

I took these photos last week while assisting a production team from NBC Nightly News, including environmental correspondent Anne Thompson, who were in Peru to report on Peru’s melting glaciers and the downstream effects. My role was to scout out locations and interviewees and to help the team get from point A to point B efficiently and safely.

Visiting Pastoruri was at the top of Thompson’s list, and once we got the permission to film from Huascaran National Park (where Pastoruri is located), I was looking forward to seeing the glacier for myself. Once there, however, the barrenness of the dying glacier overwhelmed me. The ice is fleeing up the mountain, leaving behind churned-up moraine of small black shards and messy, melting ice chunks. Stand next to the glacier, and you can see the water dripping nonstop, like the ice in a freezer whose door has been left open in July.

Around noon we were hit by hail and an electric storm, neither of which stopped the crew from filming. (They’d paid a lot for their one-day permit and weren’t about to leave the mountaintop empty-handed.) Anne Thompson interviewed Zapata and glaciologist Thomas Condom and the Mountain Institute’s Jorge Recharte there on the shifting ice, with hard hail pellets whipping everyone in the face.  The show must go on.

There was something sad and compelling about the abandoned buildings (above) where vendors used to sell snacks and rent donkeys to out-of-shape tourists.

And it reminded me of things to come, not just in Peru but in the rest of the world.

Once the ice is gone from most of the world’s tropical glaciers, the communities around them will have to change as well. Without ice, without water, who will want to visit a black mountain? Who will want to live there?

Who will be able to?

–Barbara Drake

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Mt. Caullaraju; photo c. Jorge Vera 2009

Shooting with a Hasselblad enabled EF to capture the rich colors that briefly lit up the landscape as the sun went down.  I believe that’s the Santa River winding along the bottom of the frame; I’m waiting for mountain geographer / photographer Alton Byers to confirm via email. Alton is putting together a repeat-photography exhibit on the mountains of this region and as he says, “there’s probably no better case for cliamte change than the Cordillera Blanca.”  Click here to read a World Wildlife Fund interview with Alton.

7 p.m. update: Alton just emailed me this: The mountain is Caullaraju, the first one we saw when the bus came over the pass at Conococha; the plain in front is the Pampa de Lampa. These should be on the C. Blanca map. The river is the Rio Santa, that starts at Laguna Conococha, still quite small at this stage.

Thanks, Alton.

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photo by Barbara Drake 2009

We visited this lake in Huascaran National Park last Sunday. The turquoise-blue water is fed by glacier streams. Lots of trout in the lakes.

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image courtesy L.A. Times blog

Word has been out for a while that dwindling meltwater from Peru’s tropical glaciers will lead to dire water shortages in 40 years unless radical measures are taken to find and conserve new sources. Most of the water used along Peru’s coastal region, including Lima, originates in the glaciers of the Andes, which are receding due to rapid climate change.

Climate patterns in the southern hemisphere, however, don’t worry most U.S. citizens, who mistakenly believe that their own lives will be minimally impacted by climate change. 

Changes are coming sooner than they think.

In his first interview, the U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu is predicting the end of California agriculture and the onset of catastrophic drought in California by the year 2100 unless measures are taken, reports the action group Stop Global Warming:

As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation’s leading agricultural producer. In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.”

“I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” Chu said. “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.” And, he added, “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going either.”

Read the entire interview with Chu.

I’m gratified that Chu is putting climate change at the top of the country’s list of priorities.  Perhaps now the United States will join the rest of the developed world and take action against this national and global threat. It starts with citizens accepting in their “gut,” as Chu says, that really bad events can and will unfold in their own environment.

California is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change because much of it is desert irrigated by Sierra meltwater. In the worst case scenario, 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear by the end of the century, which would end farming in California and would imperil life in the cities as well.

While most Americans give little thought to their water supply, writer Joan Didion argues in her 1979 essay “Holy Water” that native Californians obsess over it:

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. …As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale.

What once appeared to be the private obsessions of a brilliant writer are now emerging as the concerns of the entire U.S. nation.

California and coastal Peru. Two desert regions that hug the Pacific, are prone to earthquakes, and depend on the melting drip of mountain glaciers to the east.

Two regions that could die of thirst by the end of the century, unless (to quote the American poet Karl Shapiro) we find new ways to “flood the daylong valleys like the Nile.”

Here is the complete poem by Shapiro, “California Winter,” for those of you like poetry that is both hopeful and dark:

California Winter

It is winter in California, and outside
Is like the interior of a florist shop:
A chilled and moisture-laden crop
Of pink camellias lines the path; and what
Rare roses for a banquet or a bride,
So multitudinous that they seem a glut!

A line of snails crosses the golf-green lawn
From the rosebushes to the ivy bed;
An arsenic compound is distributed
For them. The gardener will rake up the shells
And leave in a corner of the patio
The little mound of empty shells, like skulls.

By noon the fog is burnt off by the sun
And the world’s immensest sky opens a page
For the exercise of a future age;
Now jet planes draw straight lines, parabolas,
And x’s, which the wind, before they’re done,
Erases leisurely or pulls to fuzz.

It is winter in the valley of the vine.
The vineyards crucified on stakes suggest
War cemeteries, but the fruit is pressed,
The redwood vats are brimming in the shed,
And on the sidings stand tank cars of wine,
For which bright juice a billion grapes have bled.

And skiers from the snow line driving home
Descend through almond orchards, olive farms.
Fig tree and palm tree – everything that warms
The imagination of the wintertime.
If the walls were older one would think of Rome:
If the land were stonier one would think of Spain.

But this land grows the oldest living things,
Trees that were young when Pharoahs ruled the world,
Trees whose new leaves are only just unfurled.
Beautiful they are not; they oppress the heart
With gigantism and with immortal wings;
And yet one feels the sumptuousness of this dirt.

It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile.

Karl Shapiro

 Links:

CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACT ON THE WATER RESOURCES FROM THE MOUNTAINS IN PERU
by Pierre Chevallier, Bernard Pouyaud and Wilson Suarez (Global Forum on Sustainable Development, Paris, Nov. 11-12, 2004)

Holy Water (1979), essay by Joan Didion

Quit Spewing Out Greenhouse Gases, America

Global Warming Claims Another Peruvian Glacier

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A new book (March 2008) co-edited by a UC Davis professor of environmental science and policy looks at the world’s glaciers from all sides, scientific, social and economic.

“Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science and Society” (Univ. Cal. Press) brings together researchers from five continents to discuss how scientists study glaciers, how climate change is altering glaciers’ size and distribution, and what effects these changes are having on human life.

The book’s co-editor, Ben Orlove, is a specialist in the human dimensions of climate variability, and his work is of particular interest to anyone who cares about the Andes because he’s spent decades studying the region. He also is the author of Lines in the Water: Nature and Culture at Lake Titicaca.

Orlove has investigated how Andean people predict drought cycles using what he calls “indigenous knowledge.” He’s also very interested in El Nino patterns and how local populations understand climate change.

Check out Orlove’s short blog, Darkening Peaks, for his urgent and moving essay, “Peruvian Herders Feeling the Heat.”

In that essay he traces his April 2008 journey to the Peruvian Andes to see how local communities are responding to the tragic loss of their glaciers.

Among the information Orlove uncovers:

* Meltwater levels from glaciers in Phinaya have fallen to half of what they were in the 1960s;

* Pastures in high altitudes are drying up, and once-flowing glacial streams are turning to stagnant, disease-breeding pools;

* Locals say that on August 1, the day when the apus speak to one another, the mountain lords no longer talk — “they weep.”

I’d love to get my hands on a copy of Darkening Peaks, which, or course, isn’t available in Peru. I encourage anyone who’s read the book to leave comments on this blog.

BTW: Jared Diamond, the guy who wrote the remarkable book Guns, Germs and Steel, loves Darkening Peaks, calling it a “rich, broadly ranging” and “exciting” volume.

Links: Ben Orlove’s blog Darkening Peaks

Publisher’s online ordering page  (the book is on sale now for $26.95 hardcover, down from the original price of $45.00)

Amazon also sells Darkening Peaks.

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Media outlets such as National Geographic speak of Qoyllur Rit’i as “the largest indigenous religious pilgrimage in the Western Hemisphere.” But how big is it, really?

The number of pilgrims most frequently cited by writers is 40,000. I’ve also seen estimates at 60,000 and 80,000. Wikipedia lowballs attendance at an incredible 10,000 pilgrims.

But these figures seem skewed when you visit the site when the pilgrimage is in full swing.

I tend to agree with a volunteer for Peru’s Civil Defense, who puts total number of pilgrims at around 300,000 over the four days of the event. Dr. Victor Andia, a doctor who runs the Civil Defense medical tent at the Qoyllur Rit’i shrine, has assisted at the last 24 (!) pilgrimages and has seen the event grow substantially since 1984. In 2006, he estimated that about 100,000 pilgrims camp out in the Sinakara Valley over the course of three nights. (He arrived at that estimate by comparing the crowd size at QR to that at Peru’s National Stadium, in Lima, which holds 50,000 people.)

Andia adds to that 100,000 “overnight” figure that of another 200,000 traveling pilgrims, who make the climb to the sanctuary and return home that same day.

I believe Andia’s figure of 300,000 is reasonable and accurate. The picture above shows the Sinakara Valley on May 17, 2008, filled with tents and makeshift shelters set up by this pilgrims. Note that the valley was only partially filled when EF took the picture. The landscape became even more crowded on Sunday and Monday nights, May 18 and 19, when the pilgrimage reached its height. Our own campsite was so crowded, we were hemmed in by other tents on three sides.

It’s time for officials to revise their estimates of attendance at Qoyllur Rit’i. The pilgrimage is massive and understaffed for an event of its magnitude.

Note that Woodstock, in 1969, drew 400,000 attendees.

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