On Africa's Great Peaks, Glaciers Are In Retreat

NARO MORU, Kenya -- Rivers of ice at the Equator -- foretold in the 2nd century, found in the 19th -- are melting away in this new century, returning to the realm of lore and fading photographs.

From mile-high Naro Moru, villagers have watched year by year as the great glaciers of Mount Kenya, glinting in the equatorial sun high above them, shrank to white stains on the rocky shoulders of the 17,000-foot peak.

Climbing up, "you can hear the water running down beneath Diamond and Darwin," mountain guide Paul Nditiru said, speaking of two of 10 surviving glaciers.

About 200 miles 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" that the ancient Greeks surmised were 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.

Even such strong evidence may not sway every climate skeptic. Some say it's lower humidity, not higher temperatures, that is depleting Kilimanjaro's snows, for example.

Stefan Hastenrath of the University of Wisconsin, who has climbed, poked, photographed and measured East Africa's glaciers for four decades, says what's happening is complex and needs more study. But on a continent where climatologists say temperatures have risen an average 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, global warming does play a role, he says.

"The onset of glacier recession in East Africa has causes different from other equatorial regions. It's a complicated sort of affair," he said by telephone from Madison. But "that is not something to be taken as an argument against the global warming notions."

In Kampala, Uganda's capital, veteran meteorologist Abushen Majugu agreed. "There's generally been a constant rise in temperatures. To some degree, the reduction of the glaciers must be connected to warming," he said.

It was 10 years ago, on the 100th anniversary of the first expedition to the Rwenzoris, an Italian effort, that Majugu and his colleagues were struck by a gift from Italy to Uganda: photographs from 1896 showing extensive glaciers atop the spectacular, remote, three-mile-high mountains.

In a scientific paper this May, Majugu and British and Ugandan co-authors reported that this ice, which covered 2.5 square miles a century ago, is less than a half-square-mile today.