A glacier in Peru has broken off, fallen into a lake, created a 23-meter high wave and destroyed a nearby town.
I got the word about this event this morning from Daene McKinney in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas. He and his team frequently work on Andes mountaintops in Peru. He said, “Some people don’t believe global warming will happen in this century. And now we have this incident, which seems like a sign that global warming is already happening … ”
He also said there’s concern that another chunk of this glacier will break off in the coming few days.
The Hualcan glacier, as it’s called, was about the size of four soccer fields. It tumbled into a lake in the Andes near Carhuaz, around 200 miles north of Lima. At first, six people were reported missing, and authorities feared they were dead under the debris, but then five of those were found alive.
Meanwhile, the tsunami destroyed at least 50 homes, according to online reports (try googling “Peru glacier lake tsunami”). A water processing plant serving 60,000 local residents was also devastated when the wave struck on Sunday.
Residents in this part of Peru rely on water from glaciers for their water supply, by the way. Now apparently there is melting and breakage – causing unexpected disasters – among the Andes glaciers in Peru. In the future, the larger concern might be for the water supply for human residents in that part of the world, as the Andes glaciers continue to weaken, break and melt.
interesting! you usually think of tsunamis as occuring in the open ocean.
If we looked up the definition of “tsunami,” it probably includes the idea of ocean – giant waves happening in the ocean. That’s part of what makes this story so interesting.
What could cause a tsunami in a lake, besides a chunk of something falling into the lake?
And will tsunamis in lakes become more common in this century, as glaciers weaken, break and melt?
People who don’t believe that anything is happening or will happen are like those folks, prior to WWII, who believed that Hitler would be satisfied with just Poland. They didn’t want to believe that there was any danger and they didn’t want anything to change their lives. Climate change deniers today are the same way. They are afraid that something bad will happen to them, so in their twisted way they think that denying the possibility and ignoring the overwhelming evidence will make the threat go away. A perfect example of “magical thinking.”
The glacier tsunami in Peru is just the latest “tip of the iceberg,” so to speak. Considering the climatic events of the past century, there is much more to come.
I completely agree with your conclusions about the reason people are easily persuaded that Global Warming, if it even exists, will not be an immediate threat. There are, however, two very disturbing aspects to the persistent media coverage of “expert deniers”. Preceding conferences of such experts, press releases will occasionally list the names and titles of some of the attendees. The titles are frequently impressive, e.g. Dr., Prof., , as are credentials, e.g. PhD, Director (…fill in blank…). Sadly, this is generally the point where those that want not to accept, feel vindicated and relieved. About 10 minutes research will reveal that the experts are, or were, employees of “think tanks” funded by Petroleum, Natural Gas, or Coal producing corporations, have expertise in fields not related to climatology of oceanography, and have been, in most cases, previously identified as frauds.
So, in addition to a natural inclination to ignore problems that might threaten a way of life, this population is the target of extremely well funded efforts to supply convincing disinformation.
The second factor, with worse long term consequences, is a growing belief within this population that science, like religion or greed, is just another special interest that is promoting an opinion. The traction of this treacherous belief in such a large population can undoubtedly be linked to the decline in standing of our educational system from first in the world circa 1960, to twenty third in the top twenty five industrial nations today; and also to the avarice of the corporations that have gained unprecedented control over our government and the press.
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