Agendas,glaciers |
April 30, 2013

Esta entrada también está disponible en: Spanish

Climate change is causing significant problems to our global environment. One of those impacts is accelerated glacier melts. And yet we tend to think of melting glaciers as only a symptom of the climate warming trend. But little is actually being done globally to protect glaciers. Glaciers retain water in ecosystems so that we may have that water when most needed, particularly after initial springtime snowmelt. A large glacier that is several kilometers long, and hundreds of meters thick, can contain more water than an entire country population consumes in a year, while a very small glacier, the size of a football field holds what a single family will consume for its entire existence. But water provision is not the only things that glaciers offer us. Their reflective white surfaces help keep the planet cool. They also help regulate sea level. As glaciers grow, sea level drops, and as they melt, sea level rise.

In the Central Andes of South America, in the Himalayas, in the Sierra Nevada, in the European Alps, mountain glaciers are at risk. Not only from rising temperatures, but also due to anthropogenic activity that produces black carbon emissions that deposit on glaciers, darkening them, and by doing so, raise their heat absorption leading to further melt. The mining sector has also impacted glaciers, destroying glacier ice to get at minerals but also impacting glacier environments by introducing road and largescale mining activity that is harmful to glaciers. This happens when extractive sector operations don’t take glaciers or periglacial environments into account in their environmental impact studies, or in the design of activities, operations, and infrastructure which is very invasive to the surface of the earth. Unlike glaciers of the polar regions of the Earth, these mountain glaciers of the Central Andes provide drinking and agricultural water to millions of people.

Another fascinating feature of the cryosphere are periglacial areas, which include ice-saturated frozen grounds (permafrost) that are also important hydrological resources. Periglacial areas, which can be vast areas of land in high mountain environments, are suffering the same predicament as visible surface glaciers. CHRE is trying to change our global ignorance of the role glaciers and periglacial areas play in many community environments, in very simple and technologically friendly ways, we are showing people glaciers and other cryospheric resources like permafrost, and disseminating information about anthropogenic risks and impacts to glaciers and permafrost, and we’re building tools and knowhow to protect our melting ice and we’re doing all of this utilizing methods that ANYONE can use to see and help protect this critical water resource.

CHRE’s work is focused on strengthening glacier protection and to raise the awareness of the importance of glaciers to communities and ecosystems and help strengthen the legal and public policy framework to address glacier vulnerability.

Specific objectives included:

  • to help implement the Argentine Glacier law, and promote glacier and periglacial protection laws and regulations around the world
  • to strengthen glacier and periglacial environment protection in Argentina and other jurisdictions”
  • to raise the awareness of the role of glaciers and periglacial environments to communities and ecosystems.

A few highlights of our work on Cryoactivism:

MELTDOWN: The Earth Without Glaciers, published by Oxford University Press, 2021
see: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/meltdown-9780190080327?lang=en&cc=us

GLACIERS: The Politics of Ice, by Jorge Daniel Taillant, published by Oxford University Press, 2015
see: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/glaciers-9780199367252?cc=us&lang=en&
reviews:

  1. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23461205-glaciers
  2. http://www.amazon.com/Glaciers-Politics-Jorge-Daniel-Taillant/dp/0199367256
  3. http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2015-4-july-august/green-life/politics-ice

Webinar on Glaciers and Mining Impacts (Spanish only)
https://www.aida-americas.org/es/blog/seminario-virtual-mineria-en-glaciares-impactos-y-alternativas

Podcast on Rock Glaciers with Jared Blumenfeld, Secretary of Environment of California
https://www.podshipearth.com/rockglacier

Select CHRE Reports on Glaciers and Periglacial Environments

Primary School Level Course on Glaciers

(English)

Glaciers of the Cryosphere  
Prepared for Middle School Level  – 7th Graders
– The Course (ppt)  (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)
– Keywords
– Test Questions
– Experiment
– Teacher Keys (Q/E)

(Spanish Version)
– Parte I, Parte II, Parte III, Parte IV, Parte V Parte VI (A), Parte VI (B), Parte VII

More of  CHRE’s  work on glaciers: