Bolivia to transfer ice from Mount Illimani to Antarctica
Staff Writer |
Scientists led by the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) of France, will transfer to Antarctica snow from the glacier Illimani, second highest peak of Bolivia, threatened by climate change.
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The initiative comes with the aim to preserve its 'memory' which containes valuable information about the past, as glaciars accumulate strata of snow for thousands of years.
The Illimani, for example, has 18 thousand years of ice, explained the director of the IRD, Patrick Ginot.
Teams of six persons of several nationalities, will alternate every three weeks to drill meter by meter to the bottom of Illimani and extract cylindrical samples that will be sent in freezing containers by ship to Grenoble, France, headquarters of the project Ice Memory, in charge of that work.
One of the evidences will serve to study all the information possible with present technology and cooperation of a group of researchers of the Andean nation, said Ginot.
With this analysis of the Bolivian massif, located some 80 kilometers from La Paz and its highest peak goes up to 6,462 meters above sea level, we have the possibility to rebuild the pollution emissions of the city for hundreds of years, he added.
The small Andean glaciers, at a height below five thousand 500 meters will disappear completely over the next 20 years, which has very direct consequences in drought suffered by part of the country, commented the scientist.
Accordfing to the specialist, without these ice reserves, the hydrographic basins will lose up to 36 percent of the water availability during the dry season.
Ginot believes it is important the merge of glaciers and to store the results in an artificial form in dams for, at least, not losing so much water due to climate phenomena like El Niño.
Those responsible for the project Ice Memory design in Antarctica a cave to store samples for 50 sites.
For that they collected three million dollars destined to extractions of ice from Mount Blanc (most elevated point of the European Union with 5,642 meters, part of the mountain range of the same name between the Valley de Aosta in Italy and the High Saboya, in France) and the Illimani.
Until now they have a simulation done in another mountain of the Andean-Amazonic country, the Huayna Potosi (6,088 meters), where they discovered that at the end of last century it was lwess than half its present volume. ■
The mid to upper level flow continues to amplify across the CONUS, leading to an active weather pattern across large portions of the eastern third of the nation.