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New York Harbor is a sprawling network of tidal bays, inlets, channels, and creeks set within both the broader Hudson Estuary and the urban matrix of New York City. Its geography is recent in geological time—the product of glaciers that receded only fifteen thousand years ago. Many natural habitats may be found in the Harbor, from freshwater and brackish wetlands, to boulder and bedrock shores, to sand beaches. Its annual temperature range is extreme, resulting in a dynamic biota that changes seasonally.

Present-day environments cannot be completely understood without knowledge of their history since the last ice age. Paleoecological studies show that the modern ecosystems did not spring full-blown onto the Rocky Mountain region within the last few centuries. Rather, they are the product of a massive reshuffling of species that was brought about by the last ice age and indeed continues to this day. Chronologically, this chapter covers the late Quaternary Period: the last 25,000 years. During this interval, ice sheets advanced southward, covering Canada and much of the northern tier of states in the United States. Glaciers crept down from mountaintops to fill high valleys in the Rockies and Sierras. The late Quaternary interval is important because it bridges the gap between the ice-age world and modern environments and biota. It was a time of great change, in both physical environments and biological communities. The Wisconsin Glaciation is called the Pinedale Glaciation in the Rocky Mountain region (after terminal moraines near the town of Pinedale, Wyoming; see chapter 4). The Pinedale Glaciation began after the last (Sangamon) Interglaciation, perhaps 110,000 radiocarbon years before present (yr BP), and included at least two major ice advances and retreats. These glacial events took different forms in different regions. The Laurentide Ice Sheet covered much of northeastern and north-central North America, and the Cordilleran Ice Sheet covered much of northwestern North America. The two ice sheets covered more than 16 million km2 and contained one third of all the ice in the world’s glaciers during this period. The history of glaciation is not as well resolved for the Colorado Front Range region as it is for regions farther north. For instance, although a chronology of three separate ice advances has been established for the Teton Range during Pinedale times, in northern Colorado we know only that there were earlier and later Pinedale ice advances. We do not know when the earlier advance (or multiple advances) took place. However, based on geologic evidence (Madole and Shroba 1979), the early Pinedale glaciation was more extensive than the late Pinedale was.

Up in the highest reaches of the Central Andes, along the Sierra Nevada in California, along the European Alps, in some of the most unlikely places, including countries like Turkey, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Romania, Montenegro, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Iran, and China, and in some more likely ones such as Mongolia, Russia, Nepal, Norway, Sweden, Argentina, Chile, and Canada, lie entire swaths of frozen lands containing enormous quantities of invisible water in a solid state, hidden from sight until the surrounding ecosystems call on these lands to provide summer meltwater. As much as 25% of the surface of the Earth’s land experiences these frozen conditions, and more than 9 million people live in such environments. Even more live immediately below these lands, and yet most of us have never even heard of this frozen realm. The Incas and the Aztecs are known to have used this frozen terrain to store and conserve food. I am not talking about the more obviously glaciated regions with visible white cover on high mountaintops (which also act as water towers and basin regulators), but rather of that strip of land that lies somewhere below the lowest limit of the visible glaciers and somewhere above the timber line. No ice or snow may be immediately visible in this region, but, sure enough, the Earth is storing colossal amounts of ice, protected from the warm ambient temperature, for when the environment needs it most. We can think of this invisible frozen region as a buffer or hydrological ice zone that ecosystems call on for steady water all year round. It’s what glaciologists call the periglacial environment. The term itself is somewhat deceiving. Peri suggests “perimeter” or “surrounding,” so we might guess that the periglacial environment is the area surrounding the glacier, a sort of buffer zone around the visible ice where logically some sort of cryogenic activity (freezing activity) is occurring. Although such activity may indeed be occurring around the fringes of any given glacier, this is not the area known as the periglacial environment. Periglacial environments are much more complex than their name might suggest.

This chapter looks at the context and circumstances surrounding the implementation of Argentina’s glacier protection law. We also examine the gaps that exist in the implementation of the law and activities that groups like the Center for Human Rights and Environment (CEDHA)—an Argentine nonprofit environmental organization—have carried out to push for this implementation. It’s a long chapter with lots of different activity and so I’ve divided it up into sections that group sets of issues. The first section will look at the context for implementation, the legal attacks by the mining sector and the provinces against the glacier law and how, in this case, CEDHA organized to address these challenges. The second section looks at how, in the absence of information from the state, CEDHA went about carrying out unofficial glacier inventories to draw attention to the risks glaciers and periglacial areas face from industrial activity. The third section looks at analytical work to assess mining impacts to glaciers, as well as complaint actions presented in specific cases where glaciers have been or are being impacted. The passage in the Argentine Senate of the Minimum Standards Regime for the Preservation of Glaciers and Periglacial Environments (law 26.639) on September 30, 2010, was an important stepping stone to achieve a framework and a guiding path for glacier protection in Argentina, but glacier protection was far from a done deal. The glacier law would still have to be regulated and implemented, the key actors responsible for its implementation would have to carry out their responsibilities effectively, and the law would also have to confront systemic legal and political attacks from key detractors, the first two of which had publicly declared themselves strongly against the law and were ready to wage battle: namely Barrick Gold, the mining company that had the most to lose from the implementation of the glacier protection law, and the executive branch of the Province of San Juan who had bet heavily on a development model based on the promotion of mining activity much of which happened to be in glacier and periglacial environments.