page_title: Chacaltaya
section_title: Retreat of Chacaltaya glacier
hierarchical_section_title: Chacaltaya / Retreat of Chacaltaya glacier
context_page_description: Chacaltaya is a mountain in the Cordillera Real, one of the mountain ranges of the Cordillera Oriental, itself a range of the Bolivian Andes. Its elevation is 5,421 meters. Chacaltaya's glacier — which was as old as 18,000 years — had an area of 0.22 km² in 1940, which had been reduced to 0.01 km² in 2007 and was completely gone by 2009. Half of the meltdown, as measured by volume, took place before 1980. The final meltdown after 1980, due to missing precipitation and the warm phase of El Niño, resulted in the glacier's disappearance in 2009. The glacier was located about 30 kilometers from La Paz, near Huayna Potosí mountain.
context_section_description: Scientists at the Mount Chacaltaya Laboratory started measuring the Chacaltaya glacier in the 1990s. Predicted at that time to survive until 2015, the glacier melted at a faster rate than expected. By 2009, it had been reduced to a few small patches of ice and snow near the top of the mountain.
  Many Bolivians on the Altiplano and in two of Bolivia's main cities — La Paz and El Alto — partially depend on melt water from Andean glaciers for their water supply during the dry season. The World Bank has warned that many glaciers in the tropical portion of the Andes are expected to disappear within 20 years. This will threaten the water supplies of nearly 80 million people as well as the future generation of hydropower. Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru depend on hydropower for about half their electricity.
caption: View of Chacaltaya glacier, May 2005
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