SNOW OF KILIMANJARO WILL MELT WITHNIN 20 YEARS

The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro – the highest mountain in Africa – may soon be falling on bare ground following a study showing that its ice cap is destined to disappear entirely within 20 years, due largely to climate change.

• The vast ice fields of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania are melting at a faster pace than at any time over the past 100 years and at this rate they will be gone completely within two decades or even earlier according to one of the world's leading glaciologists.
• A team led by Professor Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University said that the latest assessment of Kilimanjaro's famous ice cap has confirmed that 85 per cent of the ice that covered the mountain in 1912 has been lost, and 26 per cent of the ice that was there in 2000 is now gone.
• A series of cores drilled through the ice fields at different points on Kilimanjaro has revealed that the melting observed over the past few decades is unprecedented in nearly 12,000 years. The research also shows that that the current thinning of the ice cap is faster than when a devastating 300-year drought occurred 4,200 years ago, a period when very little snow fell on the mountain.
• "The dramatic loss of Kilimanjaro's ice cover has attracted global attention. The three remaining ice fields on the plateau and the slopes are both shrinking laterally and rapidly thinning," the scientists write in a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• "We present additional evidence that the combination of processes driving the current shrinking and thinning of Kilimanjaro's ice fields is unique within an 11,700-year perspective. If current climatological conditions are sustained, the ice fields atop Kilimanjaro and on its flanks will likely disappear within several decades," they say.
• If conditions persist, and warmer temperatures continue to melt more ice than falls in the form of snow, then there is a "strong likelihood that the ice field will disappear within a decade or two", the authors conclude.

Source: Steve Connor, Science Editor