Chacaltaya Glacier, Bolivia
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August 11, 2008
James Balog
Internationally acclaimed photographer James Balog is the founder and director of the Extreme Ice Survey. A former mountain guide with a graduate degree in geomorphology, James is equally at home on a Himalayan peak or a whitewater river, the African savannah or polar icecaps. James lives on a Rocky Mountain ridge top high above Boulder, Colorado with his wife Suzanne, and daughters Simone and Emily.
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All along the Andes, from Ecuador to Peru to Bolivia and south into Chile and Argentina, the landscape is changing hugely. The glaciers are losing a yard (or a meter) of thickness every year. In so many big alpine cirques you see, from the patterns of vegetation and lichens, that places that were recently covered with ice are now just bone-dry basins.
At 17,000 feet, our EIS camera casts its impersonal eye on a sorry last scrap of a glacier in a little cirque above La Paz, Bolivia. A “real” glacier as recently as the 1970s it’ll probably be gone by the summer of 2009, and if not then, by 2010. Who cares? Why does it matter? Because the people on both the west and east slopes of the Andes count on ice and snowfields to store the water they use for agriculture and drinking water. If there’s no ice, there’s no long-lived, gently released supply of melting water—something that matters to people who live in places like China, Southeast Asia, India, and Pakistan as well as in the Andes. It’ll be a much more complicated world when these glaciers are gone.
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