Kilimanjaro’s glaciers will be around ‘for decades’

Friday 20th April 2007

A new assessment about Kilimanjaro’s glaciers is set to reignite the debate about climate change and its effects on Africa’s most famous mountain.

The new study, by scientists from Austria’s University in Innsbruck, suggests that the glaciers will be around for decades to come. This conclusion is in stark contrast to other studies of Africa’s equatorial snows, particularly work by Professor Lonnie Thompson and the University of Ohio, which suggested that global warming would cause the glaciers to disappear by 2020.

The new study looked at data from three automated instrument stations based on Kilimanjaro, which look at temperature, air pressure, humidity, solar radiation and wind. using this data, the scientists were able to draw new models on the future of the glaciers. And whist they agree that the ice is indeed shrinking - and has been for most of the last 100 years - they predict that they won’t completely disappear until at least 2040.

Indeed, at one point during their research - during the heavy snowfall that fell on Kilimanjaro late last year and early in 2007 - the glaciers actually grew slightly, proving, so the scientists suggest, that precipitation is as much a factor as temperature in the glaciers’ future. Indeed, they estimate that the loss of ice on Kilimanjaro would be four times higher if precipitation fell by 20% rather than if the air temperature rose by 1°C. (Average annual precipitation is currently 250mm, while the mean temperature is -7°C).
As Thomas Moelg, who led the studies, explains: “About 5 years ago Kilimanjaro was being used as an icon for global warming. We know now that this was far too simplistic a view.”

His colleague Georg Kaser is equally sanguine about the glaciers’ future: “We have done different kinds of modelling and we expect the plateau glaciers to be gone within 30 or 40 years from now, but we have a certain expectation that the slope glaciers may last longer.”

The study also shows that whereas the current debate has been about Kilimanjaro’s melting ice, it would in fact be more precise to term their disappearance as ‘evaporating ice’ with over two thirds of the ice that is lost actually going straight into the atmosphere through sublimation (ie the process of ice evaporating without first being converted into water).

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