The heat on Ecuador

Global warming is vanquishing ancient glaciers throughout South America, killing crops and threatening the water source for millions.

Editor's note: Early Signs: Reports From a Warming Planet is a joint project of the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Salon and NPR's "Living on Earth." The series runs Fridays through May 5 in Salon, and you can find radio versions of each story on "Living on Earth's" Web site. Read about how the series came into being here.

By Felicia Mello

Read more: Politics, News, Ecuador, Climate Change, Early Signs: Reports from a Warming Planet

Photos by Felicia Mello

Top: The Cotacachi volcano, which lost its permanent snow cap at the turn of the century. Bottom: Laguna Cuicocha, a crater lake on the Cotacachi volcano.

April 7, 2006 | When Rosita Ramos was a child, she heard elders tell stories about the snow-capped mountain that towered above their Ecuadorean village. "Mama Cotacachi" was a beautiful, pale-skinned woman with glowing white-blond hair. She seduced Imbabura, the older mountain to the south, marrying him and forcing him to give up his philandering ways. Inside her skirt was a storehouse of grain, which she dispensed little by little to the lucky villagers who lived at her feet, never giving too much at once, so they would not waste it. Venture too close to the mountain's peak, it was said, and her spirit might follow you home, to haunt you in your dreams.

Ramos, now a 34-year-old mother of four, guards these stories like the seeds from native corn varieties that hang in brilliant rows from the ceiling of her cinder-block house.

"Before we had respect for Mother Earth," she says in a soft, high voice. "She was not something dead. The elders still have a sensation that Mother Earth hears them. She has to let them sow their seeds -- otherwise they won't have a good harvest. If someone is dedicated and close to the earth, they have a good energy."

Like many of the other Quichua-speaking indigenous people that make their homes at the base of this western Andean volcano, Ramos relies on the mountain for food, water and spiritual strength. But lately, residents of the town of Cotacachi and the 43 indigenous communities that surround it -- some 30,000 people in all -- have noticed changes in their once familiar environment.

In the last five years, the ice cap on Cotacachi's craggy peak -- there for as long as anyone could remember -- has vanished, leaving her bare and brown. Since then, farmers complain that creeks they've relied on for years no longer give enough water to sustain their small plots of corn, potatoes and beans. Waterfalls where shamans once performed healing ceremonies have all but disappeared.

"We realize that it doesn't snow much anymore, and that the soil is drier every day," Ramos says. "Many people say they have no water in their irrigation ditches. When the corn harvest begins in the summer, it is like a desert here. Everything is ugly."

As conflicts break out over scarce resources, the struggle to explain Cotacachi's water woes has divided inhabitants between old and young, indigenous and mixed-race mestizos, townspeople and country folk. The older Quichuas whisper that Mama Cotacachi is aging, just like a person, and she must be taken care of so she will continue to produce. Young fieldworkers curse greedy plantation owners for hogging the water for themselves. Some townspeople blame the glacier's disappearance on merchants who climbed Cotacachi by donkey, hacked off chunks of ice, and carried them down to sell in the market below.

But science offers a different explanation, one that is gaining credence with younger mestizos who have studied outside Cotacachi. Rising global temperatures are melting glaciers throughout South America. At its relatively low height of 16,000 feet, Cotacachi was one of the first Andean mountains to lose its ice cap. Scientists predict that most small glaciers in the mountain range will disappear in the next two decades; 80 percent of glaciers in nearby Bolivia will likely be gone by 2015. The glaciers' retreat could contribute to water shortages and flash floods across the continent. If the warming trend continues, Cotacachi's problems may be a troubling sign of what lies ahead.

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From the edge of Laguna Cuicocha crater, halfway down the mountain, three rivers descend Cotacachi's green slopes, their channels cutting sharply into the rich soil. Further down, the ravines divide into quebradas, or creeks, that nourish the fields on the mountain's flanks where farmers eke out their living under the glaring equatorial sun. The creeks, in turn, reach their tiny fingers southward toward the valley, where the town of Cotacachi sits framed by taller mountains in the distance. Above, in the crater itself, the lagoon that feeds these waterways sits in almost supernatural stillness, a deep-blue jewel flecked with turquoise, with two small islands like sleeping animals at its center.

Apart from a single cement factory pumping out puffs of smoke on the horizon, the landscape gives the impression of having changed little in the past century. But water-resources engineer Xavier Zapata knows better. On a clear January morning, he leads me up the steep dirt trail that rims the crater, sweeping his hand to indicate the rivers below.

"These rivers supply the communities with irrigation and drinking water," he says. "I say 'rivers,' but actually they have become very small, because they have lost their source of nourishment."

Zapata is a German-educated native of Quito, Ecuador's capital; a short, solid man with a scrubbed baby face, he wears the customary fleece, khakis and hiking boots of a Western scientist. He first came to Cotacachi in 2003 to study land use as part of the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (SANREM) project, a joint venture between the University of Georgia and Ecuadorean researchers.

"At the beginning, I had no idea about climate change and its effect on glaciers here," he says. "Then I saw old pictures of Cotacachi with a lot of snow and glaciers, and I knew that wasn't the current reality."

After seeing villagers tapping their own wells in a desperate search for more water -- one community tried to drill a tunnel to the lagoon -- Zapata built a hydrological model of the area. He traced the tiny creeks and springs back to the three rivers and up to the very top of the mountain, where the glacier once sat. And he began to suspect that Cotacachi's water problems stemmed not just from local weather patterns, but from the practices and policies of people hundreds and even thousands of miles away.

Scientists agree that global warming is melting much of the world's ice. While many of the glaciers on the globe have been gradually retreating since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th century, the process has accelerated rapidly in the last 50 years, as factories and cars spew ever more pollution into the air.

And glaciers like those in Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Bolivia are especially vulnerable, because their tropical location makes them more sensitive to changes in air temperature. These countries, like most other third-world nations, contribute little to the growing concentration of carbon dioxide in the air, but they will be among the first to feel the effects of climate change. While "tropical glacier" might sound like an oxymoron, much of the region relies on these ancient ice caps: Glacial runoff is a key source of water for millions of South Americans, and it supplies half of the drinking water for Quito.

"What we've seen in the last 30 years is very troubling," says Eric Cadier, a glaciologist with the French Institute for Research and Development, the primary group monitoring glaciers in South America. "And it's only going to continue." In the coming decades, Cadier says, Andean countries will face a radical change in the amount of water available from glaciers. "Quito's water company is concerned, but they should be even more worried than they are."

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