Scientists associate El Niño with accelerated loss of ice in the tropics

The phenomenon, which usually occurs every two to seven years, causes El Niño to produce much warmer than average ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific, greatly affecting weather around the world.

The Quelccaya Ice Sheet (QIC) in the Peruvian Andes has been shown to be sensitive to these climate changes, but the extent to which El Niño contributes to its continued shrinkage has been unclear until now.

Now, using images captured by NASA's Landsat satellites over the past four decades, researchers have confirmed that the regional warming that regularly causes El Niño has indeed led to a drastic reduction in its snowpack. The study, led by Kara Lamantia, a graduate student at Ohio State University's Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, found that between 1985 and 2022, the QIC lost about 58 % of its snowpack and about 37 % of its total area. (TatyaWoodall, The Ohio State University, more at phys.org)