GLOBAL warming is destroying some of the world’s tallest and most stunning mountains.

In Peru, the glaciers capping 18 peaks in the Andes are melting, and if “climatic conditions remain as they are, all the glaciers below 18,000 feet will disappear by around 2015,” said Patricia Iturregui, president of Peru’s National Environment Council.

Peru has the most tropical glaciers in Latin America and has already lost 20 per cent of the 1,615 miles of glaciers running through its central and southern Andes in the past 30 years. Not only does this threaten the tourism that sustains the country’s fragile economy, but mud slides and avalanches threaten climbers and entire villages.

At 17,000 feet in the northern Andes, the glacier which covers the famed Pastoruri, has shrunk at a rate of 62 feet every year since 1980. Today it covers a surface area of 0.7 square miles, about 25 per cent less than a quarter of a century ago.

Pastoruri is a major tourist attraction near the city of Huaraz, 230 miles northeast of Lima, and is the country’s most popular mountain for skiing.

Climate change, caused by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, is considered one of the biggest longer term threats to mankind and could bring higher sea levels, devastating floods and droughts.

Temperatures have been rising for the last 50 years and the Earth is at its hottest in 10,000 years, scientists say.

Peru is particularly vulnerable to climate change because some 70 per cent of its energy comes from hydroelectric plants, supplied mainly by meltwater from Andean glaciers. The meltwater is also used for agriculture and industry and to supply Peru’s desert coast, home to more than half the country’s population.

But the fast-melting Andean glaciers are also a hazard, causing catastrophes such as avalanches and floods. Thirty-five climbers have died in Peru’s Andes in the past five years after ice slabs and snow broke away from mountainsides due to melting caused by climate change, experts said.

In a major catastrophe in 1970, some 25,000 people were killed when a mudslide caused by melting ice submerged the town of Yungay in the central Andes.

According to a study by Britain’s East Anglia University, Peru is the country, most at risk to global warming after Honduras and Bangladesh because of the proximity of its towns to glaciers and a lack of disaster prevention measures.

The melting of the Pastoruri glacier has been accelerated by man’s presence, by littering, by hikers and by snow collection for ice.

Meanwhile, in Italy, peaks in the famed Dolomites are collapsing due to “thermoclastic” erosion, whereby water melts and seeps into fissures in the rock and then freezes and expands, cracking the rock — a process accelerated by the freakishly fluctuating temperatures and severe storms in Italy of late.

In little more than a month at least four massive rock formations have fallen away from the northern Italian mountain range, dramatically altering its landscape of jagged, rose-coloured peaks and the routes tens of thousands of climbers use to trek them.

The mountains feel everything that is happening in the climate. Erosion happens every year, but if the climate changes dramatically this happens more quickly. “Italy’s three hottest Junes of the past 250 years were the last three. It’s a clear sign the climate is changing and it is widely accepted this is due to man and the greenhouse effect,” said Daniele Cartberro of the Italian Meteorological Society.

“These changes are even being felt at high altitude and there is and will continue to be a greater risk of rock falls. Climbers will have to be extra alert and take into account rock weakness in their planning.”

Mountain guide Mansfred Gutter was more philosophical: “Rocks fall down, mountains change and grow. It’s how the landscape evolved,” he said. — Samina Iqbal