In a remote corner of the Peruvian Andes, men in paint-daubed boilersuits diligently coat a mountain summit with whitewash in an experimental bid to recuperate the country’s melting glaciers. It’s a bizarre sight at 15,600 feet above sea level.
The man behind the idea is not a glaciologist but an inventor, Eduardo Gold. His non-governmental organisation Glaciares de Peru was one of 26 winners of the World Bank’s “100 Ideas to Save the Planet” competition in November 2009. Gold has already begun work while he waits for the US$200,000 prize money to fund his pilot project. His plan is to paint a total area of 173 acres on three peaks in the Andean region of Ayacucho in southern Peru.
The workers use jugs – rather than brushes – to splash the whitewash onto loose rocks around the summit. So far they have painted some two hectares, just a tenth of the total area they aim to cover.
“A white surface reflects the Sun’s rays back through the atmosphere and into space, in doing so it cools the area around it too,” explains Gold. “In effect in creates a micro-climate, so we can say that the cold generates more cold, just as heat generates more heat.”
The idea is based on the simple scientific principle that changing the albedo (a measure of how strongly an object reflects light) of a surface by whitening it means that it does not absorb so much heat and emit infra-red radiation which takes time to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and warms trapped greenhouse gases.