The latest disaster risk from climate change — huge glacial floods.

Glacier and lake near the villages of
Pelechuco and Agua Blanca in the
 Apolobamba region, northern Bolivia. 

We all hear about how the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice, and so threatening to raise our sea levels — perhaps quite dramatically. But mountain ranges across the globe are also strewn with far smaller glaciers that are suffering perhaps an even bigger wallop from rising temperatures — and now, new research suggests their retreat could, quite literally, be deadly in some cases to communities living below.

In a new study in the journal The Cryosphere, Simon Cook of Manchester Metropolitan University in the U.K. and British and Bolivian colleagues examine the mountain glaciers of the Bolivian Andes in particular, which are typically classified as “tropical glaciers.” That’s no oxymoron — the Andes feature such high elevations that even tropical or equatorial countries can have glaciers. The average elevation in the Andes is around 13,000 feet, and according to Cook, Bolivia alone contains about a fifth of the world’s tropical glaciers.

Read the story from The Washington Post - “The latest disaster risk from climate change — huge glacial floods.”