Ignacio Valenzuela Moraga was a child when his father first told him the terrible story of a group of Uruguayan rugby players whose plane crashed into the Andes between Argentina and Chile. The story stuck with him and today the 44-year-old is a mountaineer who organises expeditions to the site of the tragedy, known as the “Valley of Tears”.
News of the plane crash on 13 October 1972, quickly spread across the world. The charter flight was carrying the team to a match in Santiago, the Chilean capital. Twenty-nine people died, but 16 managed to survive 72 days under the most precarious conditions, without food, adequate shelter, or medical supplies for the injured.
Realising no help was coming, two survivors decided to go in search of help, trekking through the harsh terrain until they found a herder who alerted the rescue teams, which had already scoured the area but did not spot the crash site because of the thick snow.
The incident spawned many books, documentaries, and films. The most recent is the Oscar-nominated Society of the Snow by JA Bayona, based on the book of the same name by Pablo Vierci, which brought together testimonies from the survivors recorded immediately after the accident.
Having seen the film, Moraga is certain about one thing. “If the tragedy had happened today, the climate crisis would have significantly altered the plot,” he says. “There is much less snow in the Andes mountains and in this area in particular.”
In a video posted on YouTube, Moraga conducts a tour of the site with no snow to be seen. “What remains of the plane is still in a place where, in general, there is snow. It is at least 10 metres below where it was during the 72 days that the survivors were sheltered,” says Moraga.
Global heating, associated with changes in water temperature in the Pacific driven by El Niño, has irreversibly reduced the amount of snow in the Andes mountains, according to experts. A report led by researchers from the University of Santiago, Chile and published in the journal Nature, showed that based on images from between 1986 and 2018 snow cover in the Andes is falling at a rate of 12% a decade in the dry season.
Much of Society of the Snow was shot in the Sierra Nevada in Spain, because of the difficulty of reaching and working at the site of the crash, although the Andes do feature in wide shots to convey the size of the challenge faced by the survivors.
The agencies that organise tours to the exact location of the accident are on the Argentinian side as the route from there is shorter – a lesson learned the hard way by Fernando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, the two survivors who set out to find help in 1972. They could have walked for just three days had they had this information. However, the dying pilot mistakenly told them they were very close to Chile, so they unwittingly took the more arduous route, walking for 11 days.
Over the years, some of the survivors and their families have returned to the accident site, leaving crosses, notes, and objects in tribute to their lost friends. Usually, the area is either entirely covered in snow or at least partly covered, with small patches of earth showing. Now, as the glaciers melt, rivers have also emerged at the site.
“It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that the site of the 1972 accident is different today due to the decrease in snow cover in the Andes. All records for the reduction of snow in the Andes mountains have been broken,” says Miguel di Ferdinando, a lecturer at the Instituto Nacional de Formación Docente Río Colorado, Río Negro.
The Colorado River, which divides the northern and southern Andes, has decreased in volume by 60% over the last 12 years. “The problem is not just the absence of snow; it’s the abundance of rain, because that causes floods or other tragedies that don’t serve to feed the flow of rivers as before, but rather to devastate crops. In the case of the Andes, we will see climate migrations sooner or later,” says Ferdinando, referring to migratory waves caused by the impact of the climate crisis and extreme events.
Leandro Cara, a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (Conicet), says Andean countries should work on “containing the flows when water precipitation, not snow, is very intense. Otherwise, floods will cause damage to crops and populations”.
Last year, the temperature in the Andes region reached 37C. Cara says: “In the environment, everything is connected, such as the lack of water in the Andes, Uruguay undergoing a water crisis, and historic floods in the Mapocho River.”
