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Andes peaks whitewashed to slow down glacier melt |
LICAPA: In a remote corner of the
Peruvian Andes, men in paint-daubed boilersuits diligently coat a mountain
summit with whitewash in an experimental bid to recuperate the country's melting
glaciers. It's a bizarre sight at 15,600 feet above sea level.
The
man behind the idea is not a glaciologist but an inventor, Eduardo Gold. His
non-governmental organisation Glaciares de Peru was one of 26 winners of the
World Bank's "100 Ideas to Save the Planet" competition in November 2009. Gold
has already begun work while he waits for the $200,000 prize money to fund his
pilot project. His plan is to paint a total area of 173 acres on three peaks in
the Andean region of Ayacucho in southern Peru.
The workers use jugs
— rather than brushes — to splash the whitewash onto loose rocks
around the summit. So far they have painted some two hectares, just a tenth of
the total area they aim to cover.
"A white surface reflects the Sun's
rays back through the atmosphere and into space, in doing so it cools the area
around it too," explains Gold. "In effect in creates a micro-climate, so we can
say that the cold generates more cold, just as heat generates more
heat."
The idea is based on the simple scientific principle that
changing the albedo (a measure of how strongly an object reflects light) of a
surface by whitening it means that it does not absorb so much heat and emit
infra-red radiation which takes time to leave the Earth's atmosphere and warms
trapped greenhouse gases.
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