You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Scientists Race to Sample Glaciers as They Melt from Global Warming

HeadlineJun 23, 2017

And in Bolivia, scientists said this week they’re in a race against time to sample ice from melting glaciers before global warming erases thousands of years’ worth of records of Earth’s climate. Glaciologists with the Ice Memory Project took ice cores from the Illimani Mountain in Bolivia’s Andes, noting the glacier was almost a full degree warmer than a previous sample. This is scientist Patrick Ginot.

Patrick Ginot: “We can prove that the temperature of the glacier has risen 0.7 degrees centigrade in 18 years. This glacier, at 6,500 meters above sea level, will heat up bit by bit, and with global warming, it will lose all the information that we are going to take from these ice samples. That is why we cannot wait 10 more years.”

Worldwide, at least 200 million people depend on glaciers for drinking water and are at risk of being left without water due to melting ice.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top