Another one bites the dust, literally: Bolivia’s 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya glacier is gone

May 8th, 2009

”Chacaltaya has disappeared. It no longer exists,” said Dr. Edson Ramirez, head of an international team of scientists that has studied the glacier since 1991.

Like the Wicked Witch of the West, the world is melting — and fast.

The University of Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service reported earlier this year, “The new data continues the global trend in accelerated ice loss over the past few decades.” The rate of ice loss is twice as fast as a decade ago. “The main thing that we can do to stop this is reduce greenhouse gases” said Michael Zemp, a researcher at the University of Zurich’s Department of Geography.

This is all sadly consistent with other recent research (see Another climate impact comes faster than predicted: Himalayan glaciers “decapitated” and AGU 2008: Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003 and links below).

And this country isn’t being spared — see “Another climate impact coming faster than predicted: Glacier National Park to go glacier-free a decade early.”

But the story of the week, from the Miami Herald, is Chacaltaya, which means ”cold road” — and like our Glacier National Park, it is gonna need a new name [maybe "not-so-cold cul-de-sac"]: