BLEAK FUTURE
No snow on Kilimanjaro in 20 yrs
Washington: The snow capping Mount Kilimanjaro,Africas tallest peak,is shrinking rapidly and could vanish altogether in 20 years,most likely due to global warming,a US study published on Monday said.
The ice sheet that capped Kilimanjaro in 1912 was 85% smaller by 2007,and since 2000 the existing ice sheet has shrunk by 26%,the paleoclimatologists said.
The findings point to the rise in global temperatures as the most likely cause of the ice loss.Changes in cloudiness and precipitation may have also played a smaller,less important role,especially in recent decades,they added.
This is the first time researchers have calculated the volume of ice lost from the mountains ice fields, said study co-author Lonnie Thompson,professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University.If you look at the percentage of volume lost since 2000 versus the percentage of area lost as the ice fields shrink,the numbers are very close, he said in the study.
While the yearly loss of the mountain glaciers is most apparent from the retreat of their margins,Thompson said an equally troubling effect is the thinning of the ice fields from the surface.
The summits of both the Northern and Southern Ice Fields atop Kilimanjaro have thinned by 1.9m and 5.1m respectively.The smaller Furtwangler Glacier,which was melting and water-saturated in 2000 when it was drilled,has thinned as much as 50% between 2000 and 2009,the study said.
It has lost half of its thickness, Thompson said.In the future,there will be a year when Furtwangler is present and by the next year,it will have disappeared.The whole thing will be gone.
They said their findings show that current climate conditions over Mount Kilimanjaro are unique over the last 11 millennia.AFP
Kibo summit of Mt Kilimanjaro, Tanzania.

Scientists at the Ohio University predicted that the ice sheets of Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest mountain peak, will melt in the next twenty years due to global warming.

The ice that was present in 1912 gradually decreased by 85% by 2000, and by 2007 another 26% of the amount in 2000. This was the first time that the volume of the ice in Kilimanjaro was measured. The tests were conducted by Lonnie Thompson, a professor at Ohio University.

"The fact that so many glaciers throughout the tropics and subtropics are showing similar responses suggests an underlying common cause," Thompson said.

Change in cloudiness and weather could have also been factors in the retreat of the ice, especially in recent decades, scientists said. These findings were first published in the journal proceedings of United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) on Monday.