Andean mountain painted white. Eduardo Gold's painting team has nearly reached the peak of Chalon Sombrero. BBC

By Dan Collyns
BBC News, Ayacucho Slowly but surely an extinct glacier in a remote corner of the Peruvian Andes is being returned to its former colour, not by falling snow or regenerated ice sheets, but by whitewash. It is the first experimental step in an innovative plan to recuperate Peru’s disappearing Andean glaciers. But there is debate between those who dismiss the idea as just plain daft and those who think it could be a simple but brilliant solution, or at least one which should be put to the test. The World Bank clearly believes the idea – the brainchild of 55-year-old Peruvian inventor, Eduardo Gold – has merit as it was one of the 26 winners from around 1,700 submissions in the “100 Ideas to Save the Planet” competition at the end of 2009. Mr Gold, who has no scientific qualifications but has studiously read up on glaciology, is enthused that the time has come to put his theory into practice. Although he is yet to receive the $200,000 (£135,000) awarded by the World Bank, his pilot project is already underway on the Chalon Sombrero peak, 4,756 metres above sea level, in an area some 100km west of the regional capital of Ayacucho. The area has long been denuded of its snowy, white peaks. Four men from Licapa, the village which lies further down the valley, don boiler suits and mix the paint from three simple and environmentally-friendly ingredients: lime, industrial egg white and water. The mixture which has been used since Peru’s colonial times. There are no paint brushes, the workers use jugs to splash the whitewash onto the loose rocks around the summit. It is a laborious process but they have whitewashed two hectares in two weeks. They plan is to paint the whole summit, then in due course, two other peaks totalling overall some 70 hectares. …  “When I was around 15-20 years old, Chalon Sombrero was a big glacier, all white, then little by little it started to melt,” says 65-year-old Pablo Parco, who is one of the project’s supporters. “Forty years on and the river’s never been lower, the nights are very cold and the days are unbearably hot. It wasn’t like this when I was growing up… it was always bearable. “So we’re happy to see this project to paint the mountain. I can tell you this morning there was snow on the ground, something we rarely see. “Up here we live from our animals, up here there’s no work, there’s no crops, when there’s less water, there’s less pasture and that means less livestock.” … In Peru, home to more than 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers, global warming has already melted away 22% of them in the last 30 years, according to a World Bank report of 2009. The remaining glaciers could disappear in 20 years if measures are not taken to mitigate climate change, it adds. … “I’d rather try and fail to find a solution than start working out how we are going to survive without the glaciers, as if the situation was irreversible,” Mr Gold says.

Can painting a mountain restore a glacier?