http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20021017/ap_on_re_af/kilimanjaro_thaw_1
[ Map
of Snow Cap of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Kenya... ]
[ "Great
Zoom" from NASA of Mt. Kilimanjaro in 1993... ]
[ "Great
Zoom" from NASA of Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2000... ]
[ Other
"Great Zooms" currently on-line at NASA SVS web site...
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Kilimanjaro Snow Cap May Melt Soon
Thu Oct 17, 2002, 2:07 PM ET
By PAUL RECER, AP Science Writer
[ Picture
of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Kenya, from original article... ]
CAPTION:
"Climbers make their way up to the 19,000 foot summit of
Mount Kilimanjaro, background, in this Oct. 19, 2001, file photo.
The snow cap on the mountain, famed in literature and beloved
by tourists, first formed some 11,000 years ago, but will be gone
in two decades, according to researchers who say the ice fields
on Africas highest mountain shrank by 80 percent in the past century.
A temperature rise in recent years, measured at about a full degree
since 2000, is eroding the 150-foot-high blocks of ice that gave
Kilimanjaro its distinctive white cap.(AP Photo/Picture Plant,
Michael Brown)"
WASHINGTON (AP)
- The snow cap of Mount Kilimanjaro, famed in
literature and beloved by tourists, first formed some 11,000 years
ago, but will be gone in two decades, according to researchers
who say the ice fields on Africa's highest mountain shrank by
80 percent in the past century.
Lonnie G. Thompson
of Ohio State University said measurements
using ice corings and modern navigation satellites show that
the oldest ice layers on the famed mountain were deposited during
an extremely wet period starting about 11,700 years ago.
But a temperature rise
in recent years, measured at about a full
degree since 2000, is eroding the 150-foot-high blocks of ice
that gave Kilimanjaro its distinctive white cap.
"The ice will
be gone by about 2020," said Thompson, the first
author of a study appearing Friday in the journal Science.
The diminishing ice already has reduced the amount of water
in some Tanzanian rivers and the government fears that when
Kilimanjaro is bald of snow the tourists will stop coming.
"Kilimanjaro is
the number one foreign currency earner for
the government of Tanzania," said Thompson. "It has
its own
international airport and some 20,000 tourists every year.
The question is how many will come if there are no ice fields
on the mountain."
The mountain is enshrined
in literature, most notably Ernest
Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and some ancient
beliefs
in Africa hold the mountain to be a sacred place.
Water from the mountain
supplies villages and hospitals and
already some are suffering, said Thompson.
Scientists raced to
drill cores from the shrinking ice field
because the frozen layers tell a story of Africa's ancient
weather, and, indirectly, give clues about the global climate.
An extremely wet period
evidenced in the ice corings matches
independent studies that showed about 11,000 years ago the
lakes in Africa spilled across vast areas of the continent.
Lake Chad, for instance,
said Thompson, grew until it covered
135,000 square miles, about the size of the present day
Caspian Sea. The African lake now is only about 6,500 square miles.
That wet period ended
and the ice corings show that Africa slid
into a deep drought about 4,000 years ago.
This dry period, said
Thompson, is also found in other records,
including some written history.
"This dry period
appears in the historic record in Egypt,"
he said. "Writings on tombs talk about sand dunes moving
across
the Nile and people migrating. Some have called this the
Earth's first dark age."
Africa was not alone
in the global drought. Thompson said
other records show that civilizations during this period
collapsed in India, the Middle East and South America.
Researchers put markers
atop the ice field blocks in 1962
and Thompson said measurements using satellites show the
summit of the ice has been lowered by about 56 feet in 40 years.
The margin of the ice
also has retreated more than six feet
in the past two years, he said.
"That's more than
two meter's worth of ice lost from a
wall 50 meters (164 feet) high," said Thompson.
"That's an enormous amount of ice."
_________
On the Net:
Science journal: www.sciencemag.org
