The Vanishing Glaciers of Mount Kilimanjaro -World's Climate-Change Icon

This June 2009 photo of Mount Kilimanjaro by Stephen Morrison of the European Pressphoto Agency, the clearly highlights the absence of large glaciers. Climate change and forest depletion near the storied mountain that rises nearly four miles above the shimmering plains of Tanzania are both blamed for the melt-off.

The majestic glacial cap of 11,000-year-old ice has long captured imaginations of scientists and environmemtalists the world over. Six ice cores taken from Mount Kilimanjaro glaciers provide an 11.7-thousand-year record of Holocene climate and environmental variability for eastern equatorial Africa, including three periods of abrupt climate change: 8.3, 5.2, and 4 thousand years ago, with latter is coincident with the "First Dark Age," the period of the greatest historically recorded drought in tropical Africa. Over the 20th century, the areal extent of Kilimanjaro's ice fields has decreased 80%, and if current climatological conditions persist, the shrinking ice fields are likely to disappear between 2015 and 2020.

A new study, to be published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reached no consensus on whether the melting could be attributed mainly to humanity’s role in warming the global climate according to the New York Times. Approximately 85 percent of the ice cover that was present in 1912 has vanished, scientists said.

Casey Kazan

Sources:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/298/5593/589?ijkey=WhFFa/hp06CUc&keytype=ref&siteid=sci

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/world/africa/03melt.html

Comments

[Dredd]

It does not matter which human endeavour caused the harm to Kilimanjaro, but it does matter that it happened. If we lose civilization to return to pre-civilization standards we will lose the ability to competently travel in space and then become extinct.

[bumpy]

As I understand it, what has been lost, or is in danger of being lost, is part of the geological record of long-past climatic variations -- that part which was contained in glacial ice atop Kilimanjaro. Such a loss would be unfortunate, but seeing it as a threat to civilization seems a bit of a stretch.

[Art]

Kilimanjaro's shrinking snow not sign of warming

Most of the retreat occurred before 1953, nearly two decades before any conclusive evidence of atmospheric warming was available ...

[...]

The researchers attributed the ice decline to complex interacting factors, including the vertical shape of the ice's edge, which allows it to shrink but not expand.

Decreased snowfall, which reduces ice buildup and determines how much energy the ice absorbs, also plays a role.

Much of Kilimanjaro's ice is vanishing by sublimation -- where ice at very low temperatures converts straight to water vapor without going through a watery phase -- rather than by melting, the scientists said.

Fluctuating weather patterns related to the Indian Ocean also could affect the shifting balance between the ice's increase, which might have occurred for decades before the first explorers reached Kilimanjaro's summit in 1889, and the shrinking that has been going on since.

Reuters

[Canada Guy]

The idea of a politically united Africa, Pan-Africanism, has been around for over a hundred years. While the pan-african movement has been involved in anti-slavery and anti-colonial struggles and the fight against Apartheid South Africa, there has never been any significant movement towards a political unification. However, recent historical events, quite unexpectedly, may provide an impetus in this direction.

http://www.watchinghistory.com/2009/11/african-union.html