American scientists have discovered that the glaciers in the Andes, located in the tropics, have melted too quickly. The reason for this is climate change. According to glaciologists, the modern geological era for these regions has ended and a new one has begun – the anthropocene, Kazpravda.kz reports with reference to Naked-Science
Image generated by the Copilot neural network
Scientists have long predicted that glaciers will melt as average global temperatures rise. This is especially true for the tropics, the climate region along the equator. In South America, the tropics are crossed by a meridional mountain range, the Andes (incidentally, the longest in the world, at 9,000 kilometers). Its highest peaks are covered in permanent ice. However, they are melting too quickly, and this worries researchers.
“The current retreat of glaciers is caused by rising temperatures, not by a decrease in snowfall or a change in cloud cover. It turns out that the tropics have already left the Holocene and are in the Anthropocene,” said paleoclimatologist Jeremy Shakun from Boston College (USA), one of the authors of the study published in the journal Science.
The Holocene is the geological era in which we now live. It is characterized by a relatively mild, warm climate established after the last ice age. During this era, Homo sapiens made a qualitative leap in development: he founded civilizations, cities, invented agriculture and trade.
Researchers have begun to talk about the end of the Holocene and the beginning of a new geological era, the Anthropocene. This point of view is not officially recognized. It is not even clear yet from what point the Anthropocene should be counted and which geological deposits should be attributed to it.
According to the authors of the new study, it is important to determine the scale of the glacier retreat, whether there was something similar in the Holocene, or whether the melting observed now has no analogues. If the area of glaciers has decreased minimally for the modern era, this can serve as a marker of its end.
https://kazpravda.kz/n/rastayavshie-ledniki-v-andah-ukazali-na-nachalo-novoy-epohi/?fbclid=IwY2xjawEdxZ1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHencNCVx2aP4NAG2kB_U4VH-lRL2z3kVFI5jBnLQdonyI8ks1Ly5kxr43A_aem_m99PMoD4Zkaiy2gCw5TDkA&sfnsn=wa
