Peru inventor ‘whitewashes’ peaks to slow glacier melt
Licapa, Peru (AFP) June 28, 2010 – In a remote corner of the Peruvian Andes, men in paint-daubed boilersuits diligently coat a mountain summit with whitewash in an experimental bid to recuperate the country’s melting glaciers.
It’s a bizarre sight at 4,756 metres (15,600 feet) above sea level. The man behind the idea is not a glaciologist but an inventor, Eduardo Gold. His non-governmental organisation Glaciares de Peru was one of 26 winners of the World Bank’s “100 Ideas to Save the Planet” competition in November 2009. Gold has already begun work while he waits for the 200,000-dollar prize money to fund his pilot project. His plan is to paint a total area of 70 hectares (173 acres) on three peaks in the Andean region of Ayacucho in southern Peru. Chalon Sombrero, the name of an extinct glacier which used to irrigate a valley and several rivers, is where he’s started with a team of four men from the local village, Licapa. The workers use jugs – rather than paintbrushes – to splash the whitewash onto loose rocks around the summit. So far they have painted some two hectares, just a tenth of the total area they aim to cover on that peak. “A white surface reflects the sun’s rays back through the atmosphere and into space, in doing so it cools the area around it too,” explains Gold. “In effect in creates a micro-climate, so we can say that the cold generates more cold, just as heat generates more heat.” … In his 65 years, Pablo Parco Palomino has seen the Chalon Sombrero summit turn from an imposing snow-capped glacier into bare rock. Climate change has made life much harder in Licapa, so much so that he believes the scattered population of around 900 may have to move elsewhere. “All the peaks here should be painted in this way,” he says. Like him, most of the community welcomed Gold’s pilot project, hopeful that the peak might freeze over again. “That way there would be as much water as there was before the glacier disappeared, and that would mean more pasture to support more livestock.” Licapa is above the tree-line. At more than 4,000 metres above sea level crops or trees don’t grow. The people live mainly from selling their alpacas’ wool. … Peru is home to more than 70 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers but global warming has already melted away 22 percent of them in the last 30 years, according to a World Bank report in 2009. …
