A massive ice block broke from a glacier and crashed into a lake in the Peruvian Andes, unleashing a 23m tsunami and sending muddy torrents through nearby towns, killing at least one person.
The chunk of ice, estimated at the size of four soccer fields, detached from the Hualcan glacier near Carhuaz, about 300km north of the capital, Lima, on Sunday.
It plunged into a lagoon known as lake 513, triggering a tsunami that breached 23m-high levees and damaged Carhuaz and other villages, authorities said.
The Indeci civil defense institute said 50 homes and a water processing plant serving 60,000 residents were wrecked. Trout fishermen initially presumed dead survived, leaving one confirmed death.
Authorities evacuated mountain valley settlements fearing that the ice block — measuring 500m by 200m — could be followed by more ruptures as the glacier melts.
Cesar Alvarez, governor of Ancash region, which includes the affected area, blamed climate change.
“Because of global warming the glaciers are going to detach and fall on these overflowing lakes. This is what happened,” he told Peru’s Canal N cable news channel.
Two people were injured when they saw the torrent of water, panicked in their car and crashed.
The number of casualties could have been much greater had the lake level been higher when the ice block fell.
“This slide into the lake generated a tsunami wave, which breached the lake’s levees, which are 23m high — meaning the wave was 23m high,” said Patricio Vaderrama, an expert on glaciers at Peru’s Institute of Mine Engineers.
It was the latest evidence that glaciers are vanishing from Peru, which has 70 percent of the world’s tropical icefields. They have retreated by 22 percent since 1975, according to a World Bank report, and warmer temperatures are expected to erase them entirely within 20 years.
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense