http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/40709Bolivian glacier 'disappearing'
Once home to the highest ski resort in the world and now reduced to a rocky mountainside, Bolivia's Chacaltaya range bears powerful witness to the precipitous melting of glaciers.
The rusting remains of a ski lift now dominate what was once the highest ski-run in the world perched on the Chacaltaya glacier at some 5,300 meters high.
Only a snowy ice cap of some 50 square meters remains of the magnificent Chacaltaya glacier which spread over 1,600 square meters in the 1950s.
"That's all there's left: a little piece of ice that is disappearing and will last no more than a year," said Alfredo Martinez, a veteran guide and founder of the Bolivian Andean Club.
The scientists, who have studied Chacaltaya for the past 15-20 years, had forecast it would completely disappear in 2015.
But with accelerated global warming spurring the ice to melt at the rate of six meters per year compared to about a meter in the 1940s, its demise has come six years earlier than expected.
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losing a ski resort is one thing. losing drinking water and water for food crops is quite another.
bad, bad news.