March 21 (Bloomberg) -- The Argentina coast guard was astonished to find icebergs floating along the Atlantic coast. ``It's the first time icebergs of such size reached Buenos Aires,'' Miguel Angel Reyes, 44, chief of maritime traffic at the coast guard, said in an interview. ``The police escorted the icebergs until they were out of the danger zone.''
For scientists, the icebergs' migration underscored how global warming is disrupting weather patterns and threatening agriculture. The coast guard rerouted ships after the pair of icebergs measuring 250 meters (820 feet) long and 30 meters high broke off from the melting Antarctic ice cap in early January and drifted 4,400 kilometers (2,700 miles) north. A month later, two more icebergs headed up the coast. ``The higher temperatures are causing this,'' said Juan Carlos Leiva, 56, a geophysicist at the Argentine Institute of Snow and Glaciers in Mendoza, in the foothills of the Andes. ``The situation has gotten worse.'' The implications are worrisome for farming-dependent countries such as Argentina, the world's third-largest exporter of beef, corn and soybeans. Rising temperatures prompt flooding in some areas and dry up rivers in others, said Vicente Barros, a climatology professor at the University of Buenos Aires.
Warmer weather is evaporating water from rivers in northern Argentina at a faster pace than in previous years, curbing hydroelectric power and cutting the water supply to crops, Barros said. It also is bringing more rain to the central provinces of Cordoba, Santa Fe and Buenos Aires, flooding fields of soybeans, wheat and corn, he said.
Wire fences jut out of some lakes in the area, showing that the land had been arable before it was engulfed in recent years. Flooding has left some of Argentina's main roadways under water, including Route 7, a 1,000-kilometer highway that runs from the country's western border with Chile to the Atlantic Ocean in the east. ``The flooding has forced us to redesign routes,'' said Carlos Avellaneda, 49, a manager in Empresa de Transporte Don Pedro SRL in Buenos Aires, which has more than 500 cargo trucks. ``We thought it would be for a short period of time, but it has been almost six years.''
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