No snow on Kilimanjaro in 20 yrs

WASHINGTON: The snow capping Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s 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 pale climatologists 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 mountain’s 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.