Environment Forum

The golden, melting, re-freezing and ultimately disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro

Papa Hemingway probably didn’t see this coming.

When he wrote “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in the 1930s, Ernest Hemingway described the summit of that African mountain as “wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”

It’s still wide, but may not be white much longer, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that says the remaining ice fields atop Kilimanjaro in Tanzania could be gone in 20 years or less, a casualty of climate change. Changes in clouds and precipitation play a minor role but the scientists say it’s mostly due to global warming.

Here’s the trail of data released by the National Science Foundation, which helped fund the research:

– 85 percent of the ice that covered the mountain in 1912 had been lost by 2007, and 26 percent of the ice there in 2000 is now gone.

– A radioactive signal marking the 1951-52 “Ivy” atomic tests that was detected in 2000 some 1.6 meters (5.25 feet) below the surface of the Kilimanjaro ice is now lost, with an estimated 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) missing from the tops of the current ice fields.

– Elongated bubbles trapped in the frozen ice at the top of one ice core show surface ice melted and refroze, apparently the only time there’s been sustained melting in this core in the last 11,700 years.

In Peru, the hills come tumbling down

 It’s summer in Peru and the mudslides are back, eroding barren hillsides on the western slopes of the Andes. The huaicos, as they are known in Peru, create rivers of mud and carry giant boulders with them that knock down everything in their path, from houses to bridges.

On Sunday, on the eastern fringe of Lima, Peru’s capital, three mudslides tore through the towns of Chosica and Chaclacayo. A 15-year-old teenager, Johani Lucero Vasquez, dared to wade across a slide and was swept away. Her body was found 9 kilometers downstream. Debris washed onto the country’s main highway that crosses the Andes, shutting it for six hours in both directions.

For most of the year, almost no precipitation falls on the barren landscape of steep, wrinkled canyons in the rain shadow of the Andes. But in the summer rains arrive and, because there is too little vegetation to absorb them, the hills come tumbling down.

People have been living in areas prone to huaicos, from the Quechua wayq’u, for thousands of years and towns in the Andes have escape routes showing where to run for higher ground in case they hit.

But there are signs the dangers are getting worse. The U.N. Climate Panel said in a 2007 report about the impacts of global warming that “many cities of Latin America, which are already vulnerable to landslides and mudflows, are very likely to suffer the exacerbation of extreme events”.

And shantytowns grow on the eastern edges of Lima, where the cheapest land sits in narrow canyons smack dab in the path of the huaicos.