Text and photographs by Alejandro Balaguer AMERICAS 31

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2 An up-close and informative encounter with glaciers in the Southern Patagonian Ice Fields of Chile and Argentina brings the effects of climate change to global awareness Text and photographs by Alejandro Balaguer AMERICAS 31

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5 î^^ W f I he bow of the catamaran points towards an outcropping of bluish ice jutting out from the hidden banks of Lake Argentina. As we near the giant Upsala Glacier, an icon of global warming for scientists, we can see large furrows on the millenary body of ice evidence of melting. We are traveling through "Iceberg Bay," where Upsala's moraine has been slipping piece by piece into the lake. Landslides and floating masses of ice confirm for us the effects of chmate change. We are in the Southem Patagonian Ice Fields, the third largest icecap on the planet. The immense frozen white landscape stretches for more than 5,000 square miles and includes Chüe's Torres del Paine National Park and O'Higgins National Park, as well as Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park, where we are headed now. It looks like a polar landscape with huge ice plateaus. Here, it snows about 300 days a year; the precipitation forms a great platform of ice that has given birth to dozens of glaciers. Dr. Ricardo Viflalba, Director of the Argentine Institute of Snow, Ice, and Environmental Research and a veteran of countless explorations on the Patagonian glaciers, speaks to our group. "We have been able to document the fact that the Upsala Glacier has receded three or four miles," he says. "Our team of scientists has been using satellite images to 34 AMERICAS

$\ There is a very close connection between the glaciers and the social, cultural, and economic activity happening in the area.$

6 \ There is a very close connection between the glaciers and the social, cultural, and economic activity happening in the area... tourism in the glacier areas has helped us to educate people about climate change measure the retreat of glaciers in eight sectors of Patagonia and, on average, the glaciers have receded between fifteen and twenty percent in the last twenty years. Some of them have been melting at an even faster rate. If current temperature trends continue, this glacier will disappear entirely in 100 years," Villalba predicts. The icebergs melting beneath the dark and stormy sky here at Upsala Glacier are powerful images, symbols of the Earth's current thawing period. Suddenly, we hear the roar of a wall of ice crashing into the water. It makes a wave that shakes our boat, and spectators applaud in celebration. For a moment, they have forgotten what this means for the future. Once the excitement passes, however, many of them begin to talk about the connection between these landslides and global warming, between global warming and our future water supply. They are getting a lot of information from the guides on board, and they mil leave better informed and more aware. For many of those travelling with us this morning, especially the young, this show of ice falling apart before their eyes will change the way they think about the environment and about how to treat Mother Nature. "All of the scenarios for climate change in the future indicate that the warming trend is going to continue, that temperatures will rise, and that melting AMERICAS 35

7 e and OAS Commitment by Dr. James Patrick Kiernan Cletus Spi'inger, Director of the OAS Department of Sustainable Development, has stated that it is the position of the OAS that "climate change poses perhaps the gravest threat to development prospects of the hemisphere, in particular to smah, island developing states [and those] countries with low-lying coastal, arid, and semi-arid areas or areas vulnerable tofioods,drought, and desertification." The OAS remains committed to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its objective of acliieving the stabüization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. It has furthered this commitment by helping the governments of member states to articulate and adopt diversified energy policies and development programs that emphasize renewable energy technologies. In addition, the OAS has focused its efforts on helping n\ember states meet the challenges of climate change adaptation by strengthening national technical and institutional capacity for disaster risk reduction, prevention, and impact mitigation. Mr. Springer, who attended the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenltagen, explained that OAS contribution to the development of climate change policies at the Copenhagen Summit was largely indirect. Climate change in the context of environmental sustaiiiability ^was considered in a series of discussions that led up to the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, and which in the context of Copeniiagen helped to forge a common understanding of the implications and complications of climate change among OAS member states. The OAS also helped sti'engthen the capacity of Caribbean countries to participate effectively in the Summit by providing technical support for the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Strategy on Climate Change and Sustainable Development. The OAS, with the active participation of the larger member states, should support the efforts of the smaller countries to increase their resüience to the dangerous effects of climate change. The bigger countries can utüize the various networks within the OAS to facilitate the transfer and adaptation of technologies to the more vulnerable countries. Welcome, too, is the expressed intention of the United States to establish an Energy and Climate Change Partnership for the Americas as a vehicle for information sharing and joint action in energy management and its contribution to climate change mitigation. Kl wiu speed up. If this happens, and there are no changes in human beings' attitudes towards nature, it is quite possible that many of the small glaciers win be gone by the end of the century," Villalba warns. The glaciers of this region regulate water supply and generate energy. They are also indescribably beautiful. Argentines can be proud that UNESCO has recognized these attributes and declared Los Glaciares National Park a World Heritage Site. Today, visitors from all over the world come to Patagonia to see the Perito Moreno, Upsala, and Viedma glaciers, or to ride a boat on Lake Argentina to observe the millenary fields of ice that are crashing down in a dramatic and moving spectacle of global warming. Glacier activity is generating a kind of ecotourism that is supporting most of the economy of the region. "There is a very close connection between the glaciers and the social, cultural, and economic activity happening in the area, thanks 36 AMERICAS

to the ice. It is also clear that tourism in the glacier areas has helped us to educate people about climate change, an issue that involves us all," Ricardo Villalba adds.

8 to the ice. It is also clear that tourism in the glacier areas has helped us to educate people about climate change, an issue that involves us all," Ricardo Villalba adds. All over the globe, glaciers are raising a voice of alarm and telling us that we are experiencing an unnatural warming of the planet ce retraction in Patagonia is an i ancient process. The first colonists I and scientists to visit the region in the late nineteenth century were already able to see that the glaciers were slowly receding. That process has accelerated during the last few decades, however, and glaciologists say the change is significant. "Basically, glacial melting began to coincide with increased temperatures in Patagonia from the 1970s on," Vnialba says. "As the Earth's atmosphere continues to warm, we will continue to have higher levels of melting," Villalba says. Today, most of the glaciers are retreating at a pace much faster than predicted. Each glacier has its own characteristics, however, and melting behavior is determined by various factors, including form and elevation. Thus, different glaciers are responding to cumate change in different ways. "Some glaciers like the Perito Moreno Glacier, for instance have even remained stable during the twentieth century," Vulalba notes. I decide to take a closer look at the anomalous glacier that Villalba has mentioned, so I get off the ship on the banks of Perito Moreno and meet up with a couple of mountain guides who provide support for Dr. Villalba and his team. They will help me to reach a higher area where I can take some photographs. At the place where we begin our ascent, there is an outcropping of ice as high as a building. My guides, José Pera and Bernardo Roü, lead me upwards through a remote and wüd landscape. José has been leading a team of expert ice guides for more than twenty years, so he has a lot of experience in Perito Moreno's capricious behavior and he knows how to maneuver around potentially dangerous cracks. "The truth is that Perito Moreno has very peculiar characteristics," Pera tells me. "It has been stable for all of the 90 years in which it has been studied and measured. The watershed that feeds this glacier has a much larger area of ice and snow accumulation than other glaciers. This has to do with several factors: the topography of the valley, the microclimate, and its proximity to the Pacific Ocean, which is only 30 miles to the west. All of the humidity and storms that come in from the coastal areas turn into AMERICAS 37

9 Today, most of the glaciers are retreating at a pace much faster than predicted. Each glacier has its own characteristics, however, and melting behavior is determined by various factors snow and fall in the area that forms this glacier." Perito Moreno is an atj^ical glacier in that the heavy snowfalls in its higher elevations make up for the mass of ice that it loses to landslides and melting closer to Lake Argentina. "Unfortunately, this is not the case with the other glaciers," Pera notes. Bernardo Roil, Guide Coordinator for Los Glaciares National Park says the glaciers help him to educate people and encourage a change in thinking. "The first time I came to the glacier was when I was four years old," he says. My grandfather, who was a photographer of note in the Argentine Patagonia, was in love with this glacier. He came in 1937 for the first time and I think he felt the same thing that 1 did. I didn't want to go back home, and I always dreamed that I could work in some area that would be related to this mountain. Fortunately, things worked out for me to become a guide on one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. Now 1 am also interested in drawing attention to the issue of global warming and its influence on other glaciers of this national park. I talk with people a lot about the visible retreat of the Upsala Glacier, which is losing 650 feet in length every year that it will not recover. I tell them that it also has a thinning rate of 35 feet per year and that that is a lot. It has an impact on them when I teu them that the entire ice field loses about 8.5 cubic miles every year in ice that it doesn't recover. That's an enormous quantity," Rou says. As we cross over a dangerous crack that plunges down into the depths of the ice. Pera adds that he has seen more than a mue of ice break off the front of Upsala and an infinity of icebergs melting away slowly in Lake Argentina. "And remember, a glacier loses ice not only from landsudes and chunks of ice fauing off, but also from evaporation and surface melting. For example, we can hear water a few meters away from here. That's typical on any glacier. When it melts faster than it can accumulate snow, then what is happening on Upsala starts to happen. The great majority of glaciers are shrinking this way," says Pera. All over the globe, glaciers are raising a voice of alarm and teuing us that we are experiencing an unnatural warming of the planet. The warming is caused by excessive carbon dioxide emissions, which produces a greenhouse effect that warms the earth's atmosphere as it retains solar rays. The loss of ice throughout the Andes mountain range, the melting of the Arctic Sea, and icebergs the size of cities crashing off Antarctic glaciers all corroborate scientific data on the subject. But in spite of the catastrophes that will be caused by this massive melting of ice rising sea levels, * droughts, and floods, to name a few human beings are not taking on the challenge with the urgency and seriousness it deserves. We are not taking the kind of massive collective action we need to take to minimize the consequences of our bad habits, for example, by reducing our consumption of energy and fossü fuels or by stopping deforestation. Pera is part of a new generation of guides/environmental educators trained during times of climate change, and he knows that visitors who travel here ask themselves serious questions when they see the marvels of this place. He and his colleagues do their best to answer the tourists' most frequent questions: "Why are glaciers going extinct?" "Why is Perito Moreno stable?" "What is causing the melting?" "We are facing a very dramatic situation that allows us to see the implications of man's activities in the natural environment and to educate people about global wairming," Pera says. "We believe that our function as mountain guides though our primary job is to make sure that people arc safe ^is to help to interpret the landscape and the climate to people. 11 we manage to help them take the concept of preservation with them, we WÍÜ all win in the long run." fh Alejandro Balaguer is Executive Director of the Albatros Media Foundation in Panama and a frequent contributor to Americas. 38 AMERICAS

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Antarctic glaciers' melt is happening more rapidly than was first believed

Antarctic glaciers' melt is happening more rapidly than was first believed By Los Angeles Times, adapted by Newsela staff on 05.20.14 Word Count 908 This undated handout photo provided by NASA shows the