The hanging snowdrift at about 200 meters high is the main attraction of the park on the Chilean side of Patagonia, which in that area is characterized by glacial fjords and temperate rain forests.
Landslides are normal episodes between ice masses, said Raúl Cordero, a climate change expert at the University of Santiago, but what is problematic is the regularity with which they occur today.
“It’s not just that now the ease of people having a phone makes these searches more visible, but they are actually happening more and more frequently,” he told Reuters.
“Because this type of event is triggered by heat waves or by intense liquid precipitation events and both things are also happening more and more frequently throughout the planet, not only in Chile,” he added.
Cordero said that just before the detachment was recorded there was a heat wave with “very abnormal” temperatures for the date – the last weeks of the southern winter – in that area of Patagonia, with records well above 0 degrees that even reached the 15 degrees.
The arrival of an “atmospheric river” was also recorded, consisting of relatively warm air of tropical origin laden with moisture that, when meeting the Andean and Patagonian topography, forms large clouds and discharges generally liquid precipitation.
“One of the consequences of global warming is that it is destabilizing several glaciers and in particular some unstable glacier walls,” said Cordero. “That is the case of what happened in the last few days in Patagonia in a similar way to what happened a couple of months ago in both the Himalayas and the Alps.” (Reuters TV report, written by Natalia Ramos)
Source: Ambito
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