Daniel Grossman
With Sawdust and Paint, Locals Fight to Save Peru’s Glaciers
Global warming is eating away at glaciers around the world. In Peru, a few intrepid souls have decided not to sit by watching, but to try and do something about it. Daniel Grossman reports on efforts to keep one glacier from melting, and to restore another glacier that’s already disappeared.
Video: Climate Change Threatens to Transform Mongolia
Mongolia’s nomadic herders make up more than half the country’s population, but their traditional lifestyle is seriously threatened by climate change.
To Fight Noxious Dust Storms at Home, Koreans Plant Trees in Mongolia
Noxious dust storms rising up from Mongolia have plagued Korea for as long as anyone can remember. Now a small group of Korean and Mongolian activists are working together to attack the problem by planting trees in the Gobi desert.
Rains That Don’t Wet
If you visit a Mongolian ger, be prepared for a few things. First, you’ll be served a thin-walled bowl of weak tea.
Holding Back the Gobi
Few places in the world are feeling the effects of global warming as powerfully as Mongolia, the almond shaped country between northern China and Siberia.
Global Warming Makes a Splash
I’m traveling the world in search of the human face of the impacts of climate change. I encountered a sobering example yesterday, in Carhuaz, Peru. There, I met Juana, a middle-aged woman dressed in a white embroidered shirt, orange skirt and a grey felt hat. One Sunday morning in April 2010 Juana puttered around the rustic house she rented by a stream on the outskirts of Carhuaz, at the base of Peru’s Cordillera Blanca range. The day, like every Sunday in Carhuaz [pronounced car-WHAS], a bustling town of 60,000, was market day [...]
An Optimist
I’ve never before met anyone as thoroughly optimistic as Peruvian glaciologist Benjamin Morales. I asked him today if his rosy take on life began when he narrowly missed death in 1970. On May 31st 41 years ago Morales lunched near his home in the town of Yunguay. Despite protestations of friends who had joined him for the meal, he left just before 3 p.m. He had promised to drive his mother to another town. At 3:23, a powerful earthquake struck the region [...]
Waiting for Water
Steep conical hills of brown sand and stone ring the city of Lima. Massive cement water tanks cap many of the summits, some bearing a slogan of the city’s powerful water utility, Sedepal: Agua Para Todo (water for all). To an inhabitant of the eastern United States, where water is generally plentiful, and where few lack a working tap, the motto appears at first to be either simply a statement of fact or an easily achievable promise [...]
Lima’s Brown Coast
Lima and its contiguous suburbs and shantytowns sprawl between a sand-brown desert of undulating hills on the east to the Pacific Ocean on the west. Today, accompanied by my translator, Dado, and driver, Juan Carlos, I sped down an avenue that hugs the shoreline [...]
Glacier Closeup
Nearly all the world’s tropical glaciers cap mountains of the Andes. If you wonder why, look at where the highest peaks in the tropics are located and you’ll have your answer. About three quarters of these glaciers top Peruvian peaks providing the South American country with a natural resource of immense value and justifiable pride. But Peru’s glaciers, like most glaciers in the world, are melting at an alarming rate [...]
Lima’s Future Water Shortage
As I type these words, I’m flying 39,000 feet over Ecuador. Shortly, I will land in Lima, a sprawling city of about nine million people. Lima is one of the cities of the world most immediately threatened by global warming. The city was built on the edge of a desert, one of the driest in the world. And its primary source of water is a small river, the Rimac. The Rimac’s water trickles of glaciers high in the Andes which, unfortunately for Limeños, are rapidly melting. Peru has lost about 30 percent of its glacial ice in the last 40 years [...]
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