Word: quelccaya
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Fortunately, Thompson has already "read" many of the records that are now gravely endangered. From the Quelccaya ice cap in southern Peru, for example, he has reconstructed a 1,500-year sequence of swings from wet to dry that eerily track the rise and fall of ancient civilizations. From glaciers on opposite sides of the world, some in the Andes, others in the Himalayas, he has built a strong case that the tropics were far colder 20,000 years ago, at the height of the last ice age, than most scientists thought possible...
...taking place now. Earlier this year, for instance, Thompson unveiled compelling evidence that ice across the tropics is disappearing at an unprecedented rate. Kilimanjaro, he reported, sports 80% less ice cover today than it did in 1912; a third of that loss has happened within the past decade. The Quelccaya ice cap is also receding at an alarming clip and may disappear entirely...
Will future generations regard the vanishing Quelccaya ice cap as a false prophet or as a climatological Cassandra whose warnings were not heeded? Ohio State's Thompson, for one, believes nature has already answered this question. An ice cap has no political opinions, he observes. "Quelccaya is melting because the earth's temperature is going up," he says, "and it's foolish to argue that...
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