New Findings
Mount Kilimanjaro melting
Kilimanjaro's glaciers at their margins, the surface of these massive ice fields have begun eroding as temperatures rise.
THE African mountain's white peak made famous by writer Ernest Hemingway is rapidly melting, researchers report. The snows capping Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest peak, are shrinking rapidly and could vanish altogether in 20 years, most likely due to global warming, a US study published recently said. Some 85 percent of the ice that made up the mountaintop glaciers in 1912 was gone by 2007, researchers led by paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University said in a report to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And more than a quarter of the ice present in 2000 was gone by 2007. If current conditions continue, "the ice fields atop Kilimanjaro will not endure," the researchers said. The Kilimanjaro glaciers are both shrinking, as the ice at their edges melts, and thinning, the researchers found. Source: AFP
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