Criminal gangs are becoming a threat to the world’s glaciers, which are already receding as a result of climate change, the United Nations said today, citing a case in Chile where police are investigating the theft of some 5,000 kilograms of millennia-old ice from the Jorge Montt glacier.<\/p>\n
Mining for ice could pose a major additional threat to the 454 square-kilometre glacier, which is situated in Chile’s Bernardo O’Higgins National Park, and is part of the 13,000-square kilometre Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the third largest frozen land mass in the world after Antarctica and Greenland, according to the UN International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR).<\/p>\n
The Jorge Montt glacier is melting at a rate of one kilometre per year, making it one of the world’s most iconic symbols of global warming.<\/p>\n
\u0093The authorities in Chile are to be congratulated on clamping down on this illegal activity, said Margareta Wahlstr\u00f6m, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction and head of UNISDR.<\/p>\n
\u0093The Jorge Montt glacier and other major ice-fields are a precious part of our common world heritage and important yardsticks by which we can measure how man-made global warming is threatening the world’s water supply and damaging the environment. They deserve all the protection we can give them, including safeguarding from this type of vandalism.<\/p>\n
The prosecutor handling the case in Chile reported this week that those implicated in the ice theft had been identified as a result of an investigation that followed the arrest of the driver of a refrigerated truck last Friday. The truck was intercepted in the southern Chilean town of Cochrane.<\/p>\n
Chile’s Centre for Scientific Studies has said that several of the country’s glaciers are shrinking because of global warming, but the much-studied Jorge Montt is one of those shrinking the fastest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":28089,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[177],"tags":[381,1919],"region":[26],"source":[469],"country":[],"state":[],"city":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/35600"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/newss"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newss\/35600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35600"},{"taxonomy":"region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/region?post=35600"},{"taxonomy":"source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/source?post=35600"},{"taxonomy":"country","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/country?post=35600"},{"taxonomy":"state","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/state?post=35600"},{"taxonomy":"city","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.icsf.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/city?post=35600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}