Size of tropical glaciers at lowest point in at least 11,000 years
By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley News.
Excerpt: Glaciers are retreating around the world as the planet warms, but scientists have debated how severe the shrinkage is compared to periodic glacial advances and retreats since the end of the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago. A new study of four glaciers dotting the high Andes in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia shows that, at least in the tropics, the retreat is unprecedented. The glaciers are smaller than they have been in more than 11,700 years, the beginning of a warm interglacial period geologists refer to as the Holocene. According to Andrew Gorin, a University of California, Berkeley, graduate student and first author of the study, published today (Aug. 1) in Science, this likely means that the glaciers are smaller than they have been in the past 125,000 years, before the most recent glacial era began 120,000 years ago. The data, however, aren’t precise enough to allow extrapolation that far into the past....