Alaska News

Glacial ice cubes: Chile's newest black market commodity?

According to the Associated Press (via Huffington Post), an unusual crime in Chile involved the theft of more than five tons of glacial ice from the Jorge Montt Glacier -- one of the fastest-receding glaciers on Earth -- with the eventual hope of selling cubes from the glacier in upscale bars and restaurants in Chile's capital city of Santiago.

The AP reports that the elaborate scheme involved carving the ice out of icebergs from the glacier, loading it onto a boat, then transferred to a truck and carried more than 1,400 miles -- nearly half the length of the entire country -- before eventually arriving in Santiago. The journey began in southern Patagonia, where the driver was caught early on and the driver was arrested for robbery, according to the AP.

The excess ice was then placed in tanks to provide irrigation for farms suffering from drought, rather than being returned to the ice field. Read a bit more, at Huffington Post.

The Jorge Montt Glacier covers about 175 square miles, but time lapse photography showed that it had receded a half-mile in the course of a year, making it one of the fastest-receding glaciers in the world. That's according to The Telegraph.

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

ADVERTISEMENT