A group of scientists has conducted a study suggesting temperature, not snowfall, has caused the growth of the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru.

According to the New York Times, the ice cap is 18,000 feet above sea level sitting on a volcanic plain and is the largest in the tropics. The idea that snowfall was not the cause for the ice cap's retreat was more of a theory, but the new study hopes to have proved the temperature is to blame.

In their study, published in the journal Geology, the researchers could tie the retreat of the tropical ice cap to manmade emissions heating the globe.

One of the team's methods for measurement was comparing the glacier's movement to the accumulation on top of the Quelccaya ice cap. Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist from Ohio State University who was not involved in the study, told the NYT the team drilled cylinders in the ice cap to measure accumulation.

"The big driver is temperature," said Thompson.

The study led by Justin Stroup and Meredith Kelly, of Dartmouth College, support Thompson's theory, which could represent a somber fact about retreating tropic ice caps. What's more is Thompson previously found that a part of the glacier had taken 1,600 years to grow and just 25 years to melt.

"This is an important result since there has been debate about the causes of recent tropical glacial recession - for example, whether it is due to temperature, precipitation, humidity, solar irradiance or other factors," Kelly said in a press release. "This result agrees with Professor Thompson's earlier suggestions that these tropical glaciers are shrinking very rapidly today because of a warming climate."

Tropical glaciers are already puzzling, as they manage to exist despite seeing the sun's rays year-round. They have been shown to be highly sensitive to clouds and changes in sunlight, but at other times, ice can skip the liquid water phase entirely and vaporize immediately.

"I think it's a great study," Aaron E. Putnam, a Columbia University scientist who has heavily studied glaciers in New Zealand, told the NYT. "They do something that I haven't seen done in such an elegant way."