Engineer Believed Painting A Mountain White Could Restore Glaciers — He Was In For a Surprise
In a remote corner of Peru’s Andean mountains, a sight stranger than any other is unfolding. Bands of men, dressed in paint-daubed boiler suits, are dipping mugs in buckets full of white paint and splashing the chalky liquid on the bare rocks of mountains that were once blanketed by thick ice. They’re toiling hard only to restore Peruvian glaciers. When soaring temperatures prompted the rapid melting of Peruvian glaciers, leaving the once-white mountains into bare black rocks, an engineer named Eduardo Gold came up with the idea of “whitewashing” the mountains, reported BBC.
Gold's idea first came to attention in 2010 when he became a winner in the "100 Ideas to Save the Planet" competition at the end of 2009. Seeing the potential of his idea, the World Bank granted him an award, also raising a green thumb for him to kick off the project on the Peruvian mountains. These mountains in Peru were once covered with ice. Generously bubbling glaciers watered the high-alpine grasslands where shepherds grazed alpacas. But as glaciers began melting, the lack of ice posed an immense threat to not only the alpacas but to the entire terrain. “When I was a little boy, the mountaintops were white with snow and ice. But as you can see, they now look black. That’s the difference,” Salomon Parco, a shepherd from Licapa village, told CNN at that time.
During the same time, Gold arrived in the village with his groundbreaking idea that would revive the melting glaciers and prevent the lush mountainous village from disappearing. Assisted by five other men, Gold hiked to about 5,000 meters (16,000 feet) and started splodging the black rocks with a liquid mixture that would soon turn them white. This liquid was created using environmentally friendly ingredients like lime, industrial egg white, sand, and water, rather than actual chemical-based paint.
According to Australian Geographic, Gold’s idea was based on the science that a black body absorbs more heat than a white object. “By increasing the albedo (reflectivity) of the black rocks, using white paint, the mountain should be cold enough to retain the ice that forms on it – and eventually a glacier will form,” they explain. "Cold generates more cold, just as heat generates more heat,” Gold said to BBC.
By 2010, the crew had covered an area of roughly 15,000 square meters (almost the size of three football fields. Their goal was to cover 3 billion square meters, which would be much more than 500,000 football fields. Over time, an infrared thermometer showed that their idea was working. A difference of 30 degrees Fahrenheit (16 Celsius) was clearly visible between the dark rocks and the whitened ones. Eventually, the World Bank liked Gold’s idea and awarded him $200,000 (£135,000) to work on it.
Gold, however, humbly confessed that the idea was just an experiment. “This is an experiment. It may or may not work. Or it may work a little. Doing something about it is better than nothing at all,” he told CNN. But despite hesitation and reluctance from his own mind as well as from several scientists, he kept working on it laboriously. Currently, his project is running at the Chalon Sombrero peak, 15,600 feet (4,756 meters) above sea level, where there are traces of an extinct glacier. “If there’s a chance of bringing change, why ignore it? Doing nothing would be worse. If we fail to act, life will end in this area,” Gold told the outlet.