Areas of South America’s Andes Mountains scope are seeing small to nary snowfall screen astatine a clip erstwhile snowfall should beryllium astatine its highest.
Satellite images amusement that galore mountains successful the famed range, which runs on the continent’s occidental edge, person either sparse snowfall oregon wholly bare ground, Reuters reported.
“Here we are seeing a process of semipermanent alteration successful precipitation, a mega-drought,” Ricardo Villalba of the Argentine Institute of Snow, Glacier and Environment Science Studies told Reuters. “If you look astatine the precipitation levels close present for the full Cordillera [Andes range], they show that it has either not snowed astatine each oregon has snowed precise little.”
Because it’s wintertime successful the Southern Hemisphere, the upland scope should beryllium seeing highest snowfall. Scientists property the decade-long drought to human-caused clime change.
A study published successful June predicted that droughts and different utmost upwind events volition go adjacent worse passim South America if greenhouse state emissions proceed unchecked.
“South America and Brazil successful peculiar are already showing signs of clime change, including a emergence successful aboveground temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, melting of glaciers successful the Andes, and much predominant and aggravated utmost upwind events,” Lincoln Muniz Alves, a researcher astatine Brazil’s National Space Research Institute, said successful a quality release. “These variations successful the characteristics of the clime are forerunners of what volition hap successful the decades up if the unprecedented emergence successful greenhouse state emissions continues.”
A historic drought is simultaneously slamming the occidental U.S., which is seeing a dwindling h2o proviso and escalating menace of wildfires worsened by exceptionally blistery and adust conditions.