As the turquoise lake at the foot of the Quelccaya glacier comes into view, Yolanda Quispe stops to look. She is sure more ice has melted since her last visit a few weeks ago. When Quispe, a park ranger, was born in 1982, Quelccaya, in the central Andes of Peru, was the world’s largest tropical ice cap.
Forty years on, it has almost halved in size, and been eclipsed as the world’s largest by Coropuna, also in the Peruvian Andes. A recent study suggests it might soon disappear. “It makes me very sad. Quelccaya is like a father, a mother to me. To protect it is an honour,” she says.
