In 2011, Jorge Recharte Bullard trekked with scientists and engineers to about 17,000 feet to look at Lake Imja in Nepal's Everest region. He thought about that expedition from the safety of his home in Peru as he watched the awful consequences of permafrost weakened by warming upon the northern district of Rasuwa, near Nepal's border with Tibet.
When glaciers recede, they leave an indent created by their weight. Melt from the glacier fills that bowl, growing until the pressure gets too great, or an earthquake hits. Lake Imja did not exist in 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary conquered Everest. By 2011, it was the fastest-growing of some 1,600 glacier lakes in Nepal.
On that visit, the artificial lake stretched down from the glacier for a mile and a half, held in place by a precarious mix of debris. An earthquake or pressure on the makeshift dam could release water with disastrous consequences for vulnerable communities in Nepal.
On Aug. 26, the world watched the consequences of a different version of what they feared. Above Rasuwa, a broken chunk of glacier, likely the size of a big New York City building, fell 4,000 feet, setting off a tsunami. Friction at that velocity melts ice. A great wave gathered ice, snow, water, rocks and mud - and then structures - to cascade down the narrow valleys, wiping out lives, communities and infrastructure. Hurricane-force winds leveled trees.
Recharte Bullard is safe as he writes, but some version of the same can and likely will happen in his country and other mountainous regions, and again in Nepal. Towers of ice and snow weakened by a quickly heating planet will, one way or another, wreak havoc down-mountain in vulnerable landscapes.
They came back from the Lake Imja expedition shaken, but also with thoughts about how to anticipate and prepare against these disasters.
Early warning systems with real-time sensors and satellite communications can detect sudden water releases and alert downstream communities. It could help to slowly lower water levels in high-risk glacial lakes and, where possible, to future-proofing buildings and installations. Lake Imja was a slightly different situation than what happened in Rasuwa, but it carries the same danger and is more like the situation in Peru.
In Peru, Palcacocha is a glacial lake in Huaraz Province. The spectacular snow-covered peaks of that part of the Andes mountain range are warming, creating the same conditions as seen in Nepal. One hundred thousand people live below that lake, including communities and schools that inevitably will be directly in the pathway should meltwater be released and trigger a chain reaction not unlike what happened in Nepal.
Part of Recharte Bullard's job as executive director of the Instituto Andino de Montaña in Peru was to persuade the city of Huaraz to put an early warning system in place. After much effort, they achieved that. But when they tried to get officials to commit to engineering to lower the lake's water level, they encountered red tape, indolence, wrong priorities and fear of scaring away tourists. No funding or commitment was forthcoming.
Since then, they have been holding their breath and hoping for the best. But with the ongoing El Niño event, this could be the season when their worst fears come about.
The grassroots Peruvians he works with in the countryside have no trust that government officials will protect them against these well-known risks. Huaraz is very far from Lima, the capital, and the people at risk feel invisible. Officials at the federal level are trying to pass the buck to local and private actors. But no one at the local, provincial or even regional level has the technical capacity to take on this challenging engineering work.
The U.S., where Recharte Bullard got his Ph.D., is not immune. Melting glaciers already trigger disastrous floods and mudslides. A glacial lake outburst flood has occurred every year since 2011 at Suicide Basin, on the Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau, Alaska. The rapid retreat of the Grasshopper Glacier in Wyoming's Wind River Mountains triggered a glacial lake outburst flood in 2003.
American communities will suffer a quieter, less visible threat - the toxic minerals and metals from melting glaciers that leak into local water supplies, eroding life rather than blasting it away.
If disaster happens anywhere, in Peru, or any number of American communities as this threat evolves, there will be official mourning. Why not invest that energy and empathy into acting now and saving lives, rather than grieving them?
Jorge Recharte Bullard Ph.D. has served as president of Instituto Andino de Montaña, the Mountain Institute's Legacy Institution, since 2020. He was director of the Andean program of The Mountain Institute between 1997 and 2019.