Lake Titicaca, the largest in South America, is almost four meters high plateau between the border of Bolivia and Peru. Not far from Puno, a city on Lake Titicaca, there are some 40 floating islands made of reeds totora, stacked in multiple layers, which live on the ancient people of the Uros. Artificial islands have been created in the past to escape from Incas and today are still inhabited by descendants of those who began centuries ago, to live in the lake. Each island has an average of about 30 years and families who live there live mostly engaged in fishing boats to their particular always made of reeds.
This particular ecosystem and other areas of Bolivia, including its capital La Paz, could become a desert if the temperatures, worldwide, increased more than 1.5 or 2 degrees . The research, funded by the National Science Foundation says that if global warming projections continue, La Paz could face a drought "catastrophic". This potential scenario would be disastrous for water supply in the desert and the agricultural capacity of two million people in the Bolivian capital, say the scientists in Global Change Biology. They could also be threatened areas of Peru.
Researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology have arrived at this conclusion after analyzing the historical and environmental records of the Andes. They found that two of the last three interglacial periods, ie between 130,000 to 115,000 years ago and from 330,000 to 320,000 years ago, Lake Titicaca was reduced by as many as 85 percent. The shrubby grasslands adjacent to the lake have been replaced by desert. In a first stage, there has been a constant heating that forced the trees to move farther upstream, just as it is happening again today. Later, when the weather keeps getting warmer, the system was transformed from forest to desert. An environmental reconstruction demonstrates that moderate warming, forests have moved upstream, meaning that there was enough rain to grow new trees. But with the climate continued to warm up, you have reached a limit in which things have changed rapidly.
The system is plunged into a drought that has stopped the expansion of the forest. The turning point was caused by an acceleration of water loss by evaporation from the lake Titicaca. As the lake shrank, the effects on local climate attributable to a large lake such as the doubling of precipitation due to moisture released from the lake would have been lost.
Currently, given the rate of warming in the Peruvian Andes about 0.3 to 0.5 ° C per decade, the point of no return could be achieved between 2040 and 2050.
Source: (FmBolivia)
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