Mathias Vuille, a professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at UAlbany, and his research team project that Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap could meet its demise by the mid-2050s.
Mathias Vuille, a professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at UAlbany, and his research team project that Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap could meet its demise by the mid-2050s.
The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.
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Sarah:
Welcome to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll. With me today is Mathias Vuille, a professor of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at UAlbany. Vuille and his research team have found that one of the world's largest tropical ice caps, Quelccaya, is in danger of disappearing from the earth by the 2050s.
Sarah:
Mathias, my first reaction is simply, "Oh my God. A disappearing ice cap in my lifetime." Should I be freaking out right now?
Mathias:
No, you shouldn't be freaking out. What we really stated in that research article is that this will happen if we continue to emit greenhouse gasses as we are at the current rate. Of course, we have options, and we can try to reduce our carbon footprint, start to use more renewable energy, so this is not a fixed outcome yet. There's a lot we can do.
Sarah:
Well that is positive to hear. Can you help us visualize the magnitude of Quelccaya the ice cap. Just how big are we talking?
Mathias:
One way to visualize it maybe, the current size is about 9000 football fields roughly. It's a large flat pretzel just covered in ice.
Sarah:
Okay. Now what makes the Quelccaya ice cap an ideal case study for studying global warming trends in the Central Andes?
Mathias:
The first thing that makes it ideal is just the fact that it consists of ice because ice melts when it gets warmer. It's just frozen water. With many aspects of climate change rising temperatures we can just measure it with a thermometer, but we can't really see it. Ice really is ideal because we can track in our environment how the environment is changing. We can visualize it. I think that's one of the key aspects. More specifically in this case of this ice cap, it's ideal because I think this study has drawn a lot of attention because this ice cap is a little bit of an iconic place. It is the first place where scientists were able to drill through the ice anywhere in the tropics and retrieve an ice core. It's actually a place where we have good information on how the climate has changed over the last 1000 years. We don't have many of those places.
Mathias:
From a logistic point of view, it's also a nice place to work because many of these mountain glaciers in the Andes are really difficult to access. It's sometimes dangerous to go there, and setup weather stations, and make measurements. Quelccaya not quite that. It's actually quite easy to access and climb up to the top.
Sarah:
Okay. Is it because Quelccaya is, or what makes Quelccaya better for that kind of study?
Mathias:
I have to take a step back here. Before this ice cap was drilled, we already had ice core records from Greenland and some from Antarctica. Scientists believed that because Quelccaya is so high up, it's at 5700 meters above sea level, just physically it's not possible to go up that high, spend several weeks at that altitude, and do physically really demanding labor and drill through the ice. We now know that this is possible. In fact, my colleagues who do that kind of work have gone on to drill at even higher places.
Sarah:
That's really exciting. Can you share a bit about your research team? I would just be interested to know who else is on it.
Mathias:
Sure. My research team, the person who actually lead the study is a former PhD student of mine, Christian Yolecta, who is Peruvian and has a big interest in this kind of research because it directly relates to a changing situation in his home country. This was part of his PhD work.
Sarah:
Okay.
Mathias:
Then I worked with colleagues in Peru, glaciology colleagues and friends, and also a colleague from the University of Massachusetts where I used to work before I came to UAlbany.
Sarah:
That's a lot of great collaboration happening. Now, is what you've found representative of trends in the Central Andes in terms of global warming?
Mathias:
It is. Absolutely. What we observe on Quelccaya is something we can see in many places. I've been going to the Andes and working there since the early 1990s, almost 30 years. What I've witnessed is just absolutely stunning in many places how fast these glaciers are retreating. There are several places where I did field work on glaciers, and the glaciers today no longer exist. They have disappeared. Yes, we are seeing this in many places, so it's really representative of what we from Chile all the way up to Columbia.
Sarah:
That sounds incredibly tragic. I know that your research projected the 2050s as the point where Quelccaya would disappear. Why is your prediction for Quelccaya the 2050s? What is the basis for that dark estimate?
Mathias:
We can basically divide glaciers into two parts. There's an upper part where we get a lot of snow, and it's cold so the ice doesn't melt. Then there's a lower part where it's much warmer, and it doesn't snow as much so we have mostly melting occurring. Basically, whatever melts at the bottom is replaced through ice that slowly flows down the mountain to the lower parts. As long as these two things are in equilibrium, these two regions, the glacier doesn't change its size. What we're observing now is that this line that divides these two regions, we call this the equilibrium line, is slowly going off. It basically follows the warmer temperatures. Once this line goes above the summit of the ice cap, that basically means that we have melt occurring over the entire ice cap.
Mathias:
Our projections based on climate models suggest that if we continue basically burning fossil fuels like we do today, by the mid-2050s we will have reached that point. I will add, it doesn't mean that at this point the entire ice cap has disappeared. It just means that we have reached a state of no return where we basically have locked into a state where we will eventually lose all the ice. There's a lot of ice there. It will take more than just 30 or 40 years to melt all of it.
Sarah:
Okay. This equilibrium line, that helps in determining at what point it becomes irreversible.
Mathias:
Exactly.
Sarah:
Okay. Now Peru is about 3500 miles away. Can you share a little bit about why we should care about one ice cap even if it is one of the world's largest? In other words, why is the deep render standing of glacier changes in the tropical Andes so important?
Mathias:
It's important for a number of reasons. For one, all the ice that we have on our planet is undergoing similar changes. Big ice sheets, small glaciers, and this is all water. When that water melts where does it go? It goes into the ocean. What we're observing is that we have sea level rise. A large reason for rising sea levels is because of all the ice that melts from ice sheets and glaciers. That's one reason. Even if you live in New York along the coast you should worry about that.
Mathias:
Another aspect maybe not something that's important for everybody, but I would just mention, we have glaciers in the United States too. If you look, for example, at the national park that is named after glaciers in Montana, we expect that glaciers there will disappear too in the coming decades. This has implications for local ecosystems that need the fresh water from the glaciers. It has implications also for tourism, for example.
Mathias:
That last point that I think is really important is that in the case of Peru and also Bolivia, there's a large segment of that population that lives close to these glaciers. They rely on the melt water from these glaciers for drinking water, sanitation, agriculture. Their livelihoods are uprooted. These people may have to go somewhere else to find a place to live. On the global scale, we have to realize that many countries are more vulnerable to climate that maybe we aren't here in the northeast, but this might lead to migration, environmental refugees. Those people are going to have to go somewhere. We, today, live in a world that is interconnected on a global scale. The things that happen somewhere else in one way or another will affect us as well.
Sarah:
Even speaking about the impact locally, it sounds like there's a tremendous impact culturally and even religiously among the local population in Peru.
Mathias:
That is true. Yes. Actually, in many parts of Peru and also Bolivia, the local population, they view the glaciers as sacred places. They think that they're the home of Gods, that they're Gods living up in the mountains. Of course, they are very aware how rapidly the environment is changing, and how glaciers are disappearing, how it's not snowing as much. In their world view this is often seen as that the Gods are angry. Something is changing. They oftentimes don't view this necessarily as a scientific problem, but more as a cultural religious problem. For example, in many parts of Peru the local population would hold ceremonies every year. They would go up on glaciers, sometimes bring some of the ice back to their homes because they felt the ice has healing powers. If they have a member at home that was sick or ailing, they brought the ice back home and hoped it would help them to cure them from their disease.
Mathias:
I've witnessed this personally in some places where we went in Bolivia. The people would not want us to go up on the glaciers because they said, "You're going to disturb the Gods. The Gods will get angry." In one case, in my early years, I had an accident once climbing a mountain. I came back down, then I was all bandaged up. A woman, before I went to the hospital, saw me in the village where we had to change cars. She said, "What happened to you?" I said, "Well, I made a mistake. I fell. I had an accident." She said, "No, you didn't have an accident. It was the Gods who pushed you down the mountain. You should never have gone up there in the first place."
Sarah:
I'm just imagining what the public reaction would be of knowing that you're drilling down, which for the scientific side is, of course, a huge step forward, but perhaps it's perceived much differently from someone who sees all these other repercussions.
Mathias:
Yeah, it's a very good point. It is a challenge. One thing that we've always tried to do in our expeditions is to involve local people for one thing. I think that's really, really important. Obviously, you need guides to go up on some of those mountains. You need porters. We'd always hire local porters from the villages surrounding the mountain. That helps. Even so, sometimes it's a big challenge. Another example, that same mountain we went to in Bolivia, when we went up and put up our weather station, and there was a drilling expedition at the same time. They also did not want us to go up at first. There were some ceremonies and rituals, and then they let us go.
Mathias:
We drilled just before a big El Nino event came along. El Nino tends to lead to really strong droughts in this part of the world. This particular El Nino was so bad that the local communities lost a lot of their llamas and alpacas, which are their main livelihoods. The droughts basically, there was not enough food for the llamas. Then the following year, some of us went back. One of my colleagues was chased out of the village. They were throwing rocks at him because they said, "You went up there last year and the Gods got angry. We have now this drought because of what you did." It can be a big, big challenge.
Sarah:
That's really profound. Now, I know a common question for research is generalize ability. For the research you've done can these findings be extrapolated to other glacier ice caps? I know you've already spoken to how this can.
Mathias:
Yes. Every ice cap is a little different. If we go from the tropics maybe to the Rocky Mountains, or the Alps, or the Himalayas, things are a little different because in the tropics the temperature stays the same all year. We don't really have a winter and a summer. The way glaciers work, how they operate, is a little bit different in the Rockies or in the Alps. The basic tendency that they respond to climate change and that they're retreating, it's exactly the same. In fact, I'm from Switzerland. We have the Alps there, and the Alps are in an even more dire situation because they're not as high as the Andes. We expect that by the end of the century, up to 90 percent of the ice that we currently have will have disappeared.
Sarah:
Wow. Now, how might future research build upon your findings? Where do you hope that this new knowledge takes us?
Mathias:
I think just from a research perspective there are, of course, things that we need to improve. All our studies have uncertainties. What we always try to do as scientists, we try to narrow down these uncertainties to become more precise. I always say we don't really make predictions, we make projections. The difference is with a prediction, like a weather prediction, we can say, "Tomorrow it will rain." With a projection we can't say exactly what the climate is going to be, and what the state of the glacier is going to be 50 years down the road. There are a lot of uncertainties, so we're trying to narrow those down. That's more the scientific part of it.
Mathias:
From a broader perspective, I think, our work has real implications. It's very applied work. I think where I want to focus, and where we need to do a much better job, is to translate our work into something that is more applicable. People who work in adaptation, in water management, that they can actually build upon and use right now. I think a lot of what we as scientists do is to abstract. People can hear about it, but they don't really know, "Well, how do I take this and apply this, for example, to water management at a local somewhere where we rely on water from glaciers?"
Sarah:
Now, is there is an area that you wish you and your colleagues could have dedicated more time and resources to for this study?
Mathias:
I think, yes, there are some reasons. One thing that was really important for this work is that we had good observations on site. My colleagues from the University of Massachusetts, they installed the weather station on the summit about 15 years ago. It was really, really challenging to maintain that station and to get enough funding to keep it going. You need to go back every year. You need to maintain it. You need to change instrumentation. It's been a huge challenge. Unfortunately now, we had to take the station down. It's no longer there. This is mostly because of a lack of funding, a lack of resources.
Mathias:
The one thing that we have been struggling with is, and that's a general issue, is that we know that the climate in the high mountains is changing really rapidly, but we don't have good observations. Just to maintain an observational network, it's very, very difficult to get money and funding for that because it's not really attractive, sexy research. It's boring because it's long-term. You need to amass data over decades until you can see trends and changes happening. That's been a challenge. I wish that we could have started this monitoring earlier and can keep it going.
Sarah:
It sounds like you are planning on returning to Peru sometime soon. How do you plan on continuing this work on the follow-up visit?
Mathias:
I think what we want to do more now is to use more remote sensing work. We can do a lot of work now that in the past we couldn't with satellite images. Certainly we can monitor the extent, but we can increasingly also get at other aspects of glacier change. That is something I would like to focus on. One thing that is also really important to me is capacity building. I've always had students from South America work with me in my lab, graduate students. I want to continue doing that, so to keep recruiting good students from South American countries, from Peru, but also other South American countries to come work with me and make sure that they can return back to their home country and contribute to climate change science and adaptation after they obtain their degrees here at UAlbany is really important. That's another big focus.
Sarah:
Certainly. Mathias, thank you so much for sharing your research.
Mathias:
Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.
Sarah:
Thank you for listening to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host Sarah O'Carroll. That was Mathias Vuille, a professor of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences in UAlbany's College of Arts and Sciences. This was a second of a three-part series on climate change. We spoke with a political scientist, Brian Greenhill, from Rockefeller College on the approaches policymakers take when addressing the risks of climate change. For our last installment we're going to be speaking with Brett Levy, an Assistant Professor of Educational Theory and Practice at Walden. Brett has researched how textbooks from the issue of climate change, from the extent to which they prepare today's youth for civic participation. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by emailing us at mediarelations@albany.edu. You can find us on Twitter at UAlbany News.