Research project
Deplete and Retreat: The Future of Andean Water Towers
- Start date: 1 November 2022
- End date: 31 October 2026
- Funder: NERC
- Value: £71,913.82
- Partners and collaborators: Sheffield, Newcastle
- Primary investigator: Jonathan Carrivick
- External primary investigator: Jeremy Ely (Sheffield)
- External co-investigators: Bethan Davies (Newcastle), Julie Jone and Sihan Li and Sarah Bradley (Sheffield), Wouter Buytaert (Imperial), Tamsin Edwards and Tom Matthews (KCL), Robert McNabb (Ulster)
- Postgraduate students: Ethan Lee (Sheffield), Owen King (Newcastle)
Life on land depends upon freshwater. Mountains act as water towers, storing water in their high ground for later release into rivers. Two main natural depots of water in mountains exist. Snow is a short-term store, delaying the release for water after snowfall on daily to seasonal timescales. Ice held in glaciers is a longer-term store, often releasing water stored for decades to centuries during periods of melting.
The Andes mountains of South America act as an important set of water towers for the surrounding area. The human population depends on water released from the Andes for drinking, food production and hydropower, as do animals and plant life. Unfortunately, human-induced climate change is altering the stores of water held in the Andes water towers. Greenhouse gas emissions mean that snow-bearing weather conditions are becoming less frequent, depleting the stocks of snow held in the mountains. This lack of replenishing snow, and increasing temperatures, is causing glaciers to lose the ice they store, retreating to higher and colder portions of the mountains. This is contributing to water shortages across the Andes, and has large potential consequences for humans and ecosystems.
To help manage these changes to water supplies, this project aims to achieve two things. First, better monitoring. The high-altitudes of the Andes are poorly instrumented. To work out how fast and where things are changing more scientific instruments to measure the glaciers, weather and river discharge will be installed. Second, to predict future changes, computer models of climate, glacier and river processes are required. To make sure the predictions these models are making are reliable, we will combine state-of-the art models, and compare these to current observations of change, and to past conditions.
Publications and outputs
Carrivick et al., 2024 Andes GRL_anonymous.pdf