Areas of South America’s Andes Mountains vary are seeing little to no snow cowl at a time when snowfall must be at its highest.
Satellite photos present that many mountains within the famed vary, which runs alongside the continent’s western edge, have both sparse snow or completely naked floor, Reuters reported.
“Here we are seeing a process of long-term decrease in precipitation, a mega-drought,” Ricardo Villalba of the Argentine Institute of Snow, Glacier and Environment Science Studies informed Reuters. “If you look at the precipitation levels right now for the entire Cordillera [Andes range], they show that it has either not snowed at all or has snowed very little.”
Because it’s winter within the Southern Hemisphere, the mountain vary must be seeing peak snowfall. Scientists attribute the decade-long drought to human-caused local weather change.
A study published in June predicted that droughts and different excessive climate occasions will grow to be even worse all through South America if greenhouse fuel emissions proceed unchecked.
“South America and Brazil in particular are already showing signs of climate change, including a rise in surface temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, melting of glaciers in the Andes, and more frequent and intense extreme weather events,” Lincoln Muniz Alves, a researcher at Brazil’s National Space Research Institute, said in a news release. “These variations in the characteristics of the climate are forerunners of what will happen in the decades ahead if the unprecedented rise in greenhouse gas emissions continues.”
A historic drought is simultaneously slamming the western U.S., which is seeing a dwindling water provide and escalating risk of wildfires worsened by exceptionally sizzling and dry situations.
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