18 December 2006The Moscow Times.comCharles J. Hanley
Rivers of ice at the Equator -- foretold in the 2nd century, found in the 19th -- are now melting away in this new century, returning to the realm of lore and fading photographs.
From the nearly two-kilometer-high Naro Moru, villagers have watched year by year as the great glaciers of Mount Kenya, glinting in the equatorial sun high above them, have retreated into shrunken white stains on the rocky shoulders of the 5,069-meter peak.
Climbing up, "you can hear the water running down beneath Diamond and Darwin," said Paul Nditiru, a guide, referring to two of 10 surviving glaciers.
Some 320 kilometers due south, the storied snows of Mount Kilimanjaro, the tropical glaciers first seen by disbelieving Europeans in 1848, are vanishing. And to the west, in the heart of equatorial Africa, the ice caps are shrinking fast atop Uganda's Rwenzoris, the "Mountains of the Moon" imagined by ancient Greeks as the source of the Nile River.
The total loss of ice masses ringing Africa's three highest peaks, projected by scientists to happen sometime in the next two to five decades, fits a global pattern playing out in South America's Andes Mountains, Europe's Alps, the Himalayas and beyond. Almost every one of more than 300 large glaciers studied worldwide is in retreat, international glaciologists reported in October in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. This is "essentially a response to post-1970 global warming," they said.
It was 10 years ago, on the 100th anniversary of the Italian first expedition to the Rwenzoris, that veteran meteorologist Abushen Majugu and colleagues were struck by an Italian gift to Uganda: photographs from 1896 showing extensive glaciers atop the spectacular, remote, 5-kilometer-high mountains.
In a scientific paper this May, Majugu and British and Ugandan co-authors reported that this ice, which covered 6.4 square kilometers one century ago, has diminished to less than 1.28 square kilometers today. The glaciers are "expected to disappear within the next two decades," they concluded. And because the 2nd century Greeks were right, that means a secondary source of Nile River waters will also disappear.
Eight of 18 glaciers are already gone.
"Northey's gone. Gregory's about finished," John Maina said, as if mourning friends. The 56-year-old knows Mount Kenya's glaciers and peaks well, having led climbers up its face since childhood.
Hardships may spread even to Nairobi, Kenya's metropolis.
Most of this country's shaky electric grid relies on hydropower, and much of that is drawn from waters streaming off Mount Kenya. In a United Nations study issued in early November, scientists predicted that the glacial rivers of Mount Kenya and the rest of east Africa could dry up in 15 years.
Scientists say such repercussions would multiply across a world where human settlements have come to depend on steady runoffs from healthy glaciers -- in Peru and Bolivia, India and China. And it would extend beyond that, they say, to coastal settlements everywhere, as oceans rise from heat expansion and the melting of land ice.
