'Society of the Snow' would’ve gone differently in today’s climate

The Valley of the Tears sits in the remote Andes Mountains in the Argentine province of Mendoza, on the border with Chile. In 1972, a plane carrying 45 people crashed here. Experts say snow cushioned the fall, but climate change has since caused a drastic decline in the region's snow.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.

The large amount of snow made the cold worse and the days in the mountains unbearable for the survivors, but some aviation experts think the plane couldn’t have survived without it. The plane crashed into the mountains near the border between Chile and Argentina and then slid down to an area called the “Valley of Tears” . In 2019,which Cordero participated found that area of the Andes has been getting around 10 percent less snow per decade since the 70s. People who visit the mountains regularly have also witnessed this change.

“What is extraordinary about the rescue photos is that there was snow in December. Nowadays it is very unlikely snow would last until December. It has melted by then,” Cordero says.“Snow cover is declining almost everywhere in the world. There are a few places where it’s not, but even there it probably can’t compensate for the extra melting we are seeing,” says Michael Lehning, a snow scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research.

This means snow itself cools the environment, and the lack of snow at the crash site could have made the cold more bearable.

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