EAST AFRICA: The snows of Kilimanjaro, glaciers that grace the top of Africa's highest mountain, may disappear. Its ice cover is melting away at about a half meter a year and could disappear by 2020, according to new research.
Scientists are now involved in a race against time to take ice cores from the 5,895 metre high volcanic peak to try to understand why the glaciers are disappearing. The cores provide detailed information about weather conditions across the tropics going back 12,000 years, but all this will be lost once the ice is gone.
"We are working urgently to understand the dramatic retreat of glaciers currently under way on Kilimanjaro before the evidence and the historical record disappear," said Dr Douglas Hardy of the University of Massachusetts, part of the research team led by Prof Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University. Details of their work are published this morning in the journal Science.
In 1912 the glaciers covered 12 sq km but by 2000 that figure was down to just 2.6 sq km. "We found that the summit of the ice fields has lowered by at least 17 metres since 1962," Prof Thompson said. "That's an average loss of about a half metre in height each year."
Researchers have recovered 215 meters of frozen ice cores and are using radioactive residues deposited in 1951-52 to date them. A dust layer in the ice points to a 300-year drought in the region 4,000 years ago, which threatened the rule of the pharaohs. The cores tell of a wetter climate 9,500 years ago when the now-17,000 sq km Lake Chad covered 350,000 sq km. The record halts about 12,000 years ago, the last time Kilimanjaro was without its white crown.