Accelerating glacial melt in the Andes caused by climate change has set off a gold rush downstream, letting the desert bloom. But as the ice vanishes, the vast farms below may do the same.
A 30-year-old photograph taken from a nearby location was placed on the path to the Pastoruri glacier in Áncash, Peru, showing how far the ice has retreated. Credit: Tomas Munita for The New York Times
Excerpt:
The desert blooms now. Blueberries grow to the size of Ping-Pong balls in nothing but sand. Asparagus fields cross dunes, disappearing over the horizon.
The desert produce is packed and shipped to places like Denmark and Delaware. Electricity and water have come to villages that long had neither. Farmers have moved here from the mountains, seeking new futures on all the irrigated land.
It might sound like a perfect development plan, except for one catch: The reason so much water flows through this desert is that an icecap high up in the mountains is melting away.
And the bonanza may not last much longer.
“If the water disappears, we’d have to go back to how it was before,” said Miguel Beltrán, a 62-year-old farmer who worries what will happen when water levels fall. “The land was empty and people went hungry.”
In this part of Peru, climate change has been a blessing — but it may become a curse. In recent decades, accelerating glacial melt in the Andes has enabled a gold rush downstream, contributing to the irrigation and cultivation of more than 100,000 acres of land since the 1980s.
Yet the boon is temporary. The flow of water is already declining as the glacier vanishes, and scientists estimate that by 2050 much of the icecap will be gone.
The glaciers are the source of water for much of the coast during Peru’s dry season, which extends from May to September. But the icecap of the Cordillera Blanca, long a supply of water for the Chavimochic irrigation project, has shrunk by 40 percent since 1970 and is retreating at an ever-faster rate. It is currently receding by about 30 feet a year, scientists say.
Farmers along the 100-mile watershed that winds its way from the snowcapped peaks to the desert dunes say they are already feeling the effects of the change.
The retreat of the icecap has exposed tracts of heavy metals, like lead and cadmium, that were locked under the glaciers for thousands of years, scientists say. They are now leaking into the ground water supply, turning entire streams red, killing livestock and crops, and making the water undrinkable.
A team of glacier researchers walking in Cordillera Blanca, Peru. The temperature at the site of the glaciers rose between 0.5 and 0.8 degrees Celsius between the 1970s and early 2000s. Credit: Tomas Munita for The New York Times
Sand dunes near agricultural lands in Viru Valley, Peru. Credit: Tomas Munita for The New York Times
