From Bolivia To Kenya To Nepal, Glaciers Split, Melt, Retreat

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CHACALTAYA GLACIER, Bolivia: "Up and down the icy spine of South America, the glaciers are melting, the white mantle of the Andes Mountains washing away at an ever faster rate. "Look. You can see. Chacaltaya has split in two," scientist Edson Ramirez said as he led a visitor up toward the once-grand ice flow, predicting the glacier would be gone in seven to eight years. And the ice masses are disappearing far beyond Bolivia.

From Alaska in the north, to Montana's Glacier National Park, to the great ice fields of wild Patagonia at this continent's southern tip, the "rivers of ice" that have marked landscapes from prehistory are liquefying, shrinking, retreating.

In the distance below, beneath drifting clouds, sprawled 3660m-high La Paz, a growing city that survives on the water running off the shoulders of these treeless peaks. Chacaltaya, a frozen storehouse of such water, will be gone in seven to eight years, said Ramirez, a Bolivian glaciologist, or ice specialist. "Some small glaciers like this have already disappeared," he said as melting icicles dripped on nearby rock, exposed for the first time in millennia. "In the next 10 years, many more will."

In east Africa, the storied snows of Mount Kilimanjaro are vanishing. In the icebound Alps and Himalayas of Europe and Asia, the change has been stunning. From South America to south Asia, new glacial lakes threaten to overflow and drown villages below. In the past few years, space satellites have helped measure the global trend, but scientists such as Rajendra K. Pachauri, a native of north India, have long seen what was happening on the ground. "I know from observation," Pachauri told a reporter at an international climate conference in Argentina. "If you go to the Himalayan peaks, the rate at which the glaciers are retreating is alarming. And this is not an isolated example. I've seen photographs of Mount Kilimanjaro 50 years ago and now. The evidence is visible."

EDIT

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12103040%255E30417,00.html

[On the Road]

1. Best Argument for Global Warming

for anyone who still doubts it: Before and after pictures of glaciers on every continent, today versus 50-100 years ago.

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2. Remember the great midwest locust plague of 1873?

Probably not.

In any case, I saw a program recently where they'd found out what happened to all of them (they'd mysteriously disappeared and haven't come back).

Turns out, the swarms mostly got swept into the Rockies and were frozen. A biologist dug a number of samples out of a melting glacier on the show, and sure enough, there were the locusts.

What I wonder is if any of them, or their eggs, could survive being frozen and thawed? Bugs have a crazy knack for surviving things like that. Anyway, those glaciers are melting fast, so we'll find out soon enough.

So we might have that to look forward to as well!