Assessing climate change and glacier status in the high Andes of central Chile

Abstract:

Chile includes about 80% of all Andean glaciers, distributed from the Dry Andes in the north to the vast Patagonian and Tierra del Fuego icefields in the south. The largest glaciers in the high Andes occur in central Chile, being sensitive indicators of climate changes, providing valuable water resources, particularly in the current megadrought scenario which has affected central Chile over the last 10 years, and also presenting natural hazards to downstream areas. The Glaciology and Snow Unit of the General Water Directorate of Chile’s Ministry of Public Works operates a network of 40 automatic weather stations (AWS), of which 34 are located in the periphery of glaciers, and 6 are deployed on the glacier surface. The 3 most recent stations were deployed in December 2019 at the headwaters of Aconcagua and Maipo rivers, which provide water to over 8 million people, including Santiago, which contains 45% of Chile’s population. One of these new stations, Tupungatito Alto, is located at 5575 m a.s.l., becoming the highest AWS in Chile. The presence of permafrost has been recorded at this station, with a mean summer temperature of -6˚C at 2 m depth, a minimum air temperature of -32˚C during winter and a maximum wind speed of 163 km/h so far. A 61 m deep ice core was retrieved in 2012 some 500 m south of the Tupungatito AWS by the University of Maine and Centro de Estudios Científicos, which can provide a valuable paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental record to be calibrated with the new meteorological data.