Climate Change: ‘Mega-drought in Andes, some peaks snowless,’ say scientists

The Andes mountain ranges covering South America, which welcome tourists across the globe are famous for their snow-capped mountains and are most favourable for skiers. They are witnessing less snowfall which climate scientists say is a result of global warming.

Andes losses its snow cover due to global heat

Consequent to the surging climate change, a large mountainous region between Ecuador and Argentina have patchy snow zones or no snow at all, with mountain regions exposed brown.

The scarcity in the snowfall will consequently result in lesser precipitation in the region, scientists have predicted. The rising heat will further result in a long-term decrease in precipitation, resulting in a mega-drought. The precipitation levels right now for the entire Cordillera (Andes range) shows that it has either not snowed at all or has snowed very little, scientists discovered. 

The Southern Hemisphere is experiencing winter when snowfall should be maximum and the mountains should deposit maximum snow for the coming time period. The glaciers on these mountains are the only source of water for the entire civilization in the Andes region and the loss of snow in the region might result in a drought.
 

The Andes' glaciers, which between 2000-2010 remained the same size or even grew, are now receding. The ski resort owners that have reopened after being closed at length during the pandemic are attending the skiers to the Argentina-Chile border, but scarce snowfall has forced some of them to move snow to cover popular runs or make artificial snow.

Severe cyclonic storm on the rise in North Indian ocean due to global warming

On the other hand, climate change and global warming have seriously disturbed the spread and the intensity of tropical cyclones across the oceans worldwide. Man-made global warming has had “a considerable impact on global tropical cyclones”, scientists have found earlier, and while the southern Indian Ocean has witnessed lesser tropical cyclones originations over the past decades, the North Indian Ocean region has shown a drastic spike in its intensity of the cyclonic storms, a new study conducted by leading Indian scientists revealed, Thursday, July 30.

In a press release by the Indian Ministry of Science & Technology, scientists rang the alarm about the role of global warming in the rise of the intensity of severe cyclonic storms that have major socio-economic implications. This rise, the experts are associating with the turbulence in the atmospheric parameters like higher relative humidity, weak vertical wind shear as well as warm sea surface temperature (SST) caused by global warming. “Frequency and high-intensity tropical cyclones formed over global ocean basins is a matter of concern,” scientists purported, adding that these cyclones pose vulnerability and significant risks to the coastal regions.

(Image: Unsplash)