©AFP PHOTO / DAN COLLYNS

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.
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 200,000-dollar prize money to fund his pilot project. His plan is to paint a total area of 70 hectares (173 acres) on three peaks in the Andean region of Ayacucho in southern Peru.
Chalon Sombrero, the name of an extinct glacier which used to irrigate a valley and several rivers, is where he's started with a team of four men from the local village, Licapa.
The workers use jugs - rather than paintbrushes - 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 on that peak.
"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 it 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.
US Energy Secretary Steven Chu has endorsed using white roofs in the United States to help combat climate change, an idea seen as more logistically feasible than painting mountain peaks.
Gold, who has no scientific qualifications, adds: "I'm very hopeful that by doing this we could re-grow a glacier here because we would be recreating all the climactic conditions necessary for a glacier to form.
In his 65 years, Pablo Parco Palomino has seen the Chalon Sombrero summit turn from an imposing snow-capped glacier into bare rock. Climate change has made life much harder in Licapa, so much so that he believes the scattered population of around 900 may have to move elsewhere.
"All the peaks here should be painted in this way," he says. Like him, most of the community welcomed Gold's pilot project, hopeful that the peak might freeze over again.
Peru is home to more than 70 percent of the world's tropical glaciers but global warming has already melted away 22 percent of them in the last 30 years, according to a World Bank report in 2009.
Peru's Environment Minister Antonio Brack has said the World Bank's 200,000 dollars in funding would be better spent on other "projects which would have more impact in mitigating climate change."
"It's nonsense", he commented bluntly last year.
But Gold believes he can put the theory into practice and get results.
"I'd rather try and fail to find a solution than start working out how we are going to survive without the glaciers, as if the situation was irreversible," he says.

Published 03.07.2010