Which has lost 26% of its ice since 2000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/world/africa/03melt.html?hp
Brian
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/world/africa/03melt.html?hp
Brian
Article on Kili's retreating glacier
- Thread starter B the Hiker
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erugs
New member
Interesting article and I'm glad that several perspectives were given. When we were there in 2003, our support crew (porters) had great difficulty in finding water for our use. We were very limited our last day, from our camp at Furtwangler Glacier (18,700 ft). It seems that if the glaciers were "melting" then water would not have been an issue. The idea of less moisture makes much more sense, with the glaciers sublimating. The article also stated what I have read before that these changes have come and gone over many thousands of years.
Kilimanjaro is a beautiful mountain, especially because of the change from a hot climate to one with glaciers.
Kilimanjaro is a beautiful mountain, especially because of the change from a hot climate to one with glaciers.
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Chip
Well-known member
That's a perfect picture for the question I had; is there a reason the summit glacier drops off like a cliff ? I know glaciers "flow" and I've seen them terminate like that in a valley or bay, but the Kili summit ice ending like that in the dirt seems odd/improbable.
erugs
New member
When we were there that night we heard a big crumbling/cracking sound as more fell off the edge. I wonder if at one time it fill the valley floor of the region it is in an has been splintering off since then. Here's another shot, which shows our porter trying to dig a hole for water:
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erugs
New member
The Furtwangler Glacier is seen on the left of the view towards the summit from Shira Plateau. Arrow Glacier and Western Breech (R) are below it. It is at the Arrow Glacier area that rocks fell a few years ago killing some AMC hikers.
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Little Rickie
New member
That's a perfect picture for the question I had; is there a reason the summit glacier drops off like a cliff ? I know glaciers "flow" and I've seen them terminate like that in a valley or bay, but the Kili summit ice ending like that in the dirt seems odd/improbable.
I'm guessing the sun rays go only just so far into the ice and weakens the front just enough so it just drops down. If the soil drains well the ice melts into to soil before the next layer sloughs off.
That's not very scientific though. Doug?
DougPaul
Well-known member
Possibly.
My guess is that the dark dirt absorbs more heat from the sun than the ice and thus melts it from the bottom.
Doug
erugs
New member
Doug - your suggestion makes sense but research has not found melting to be an issue there. In fact, water there is scarce. The moisture that was ice disappears.
Chip
Well-known member
from the article linked below said:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0923_030923_kilimanjaroglaciers.html
DougPaul
Well-known member
The glacier cliffs on Kili are interesting features, they are caused by differential ablation over the glacier. The year round temp is below freezing which means that ablation is from latent heat flux and incoming shortwave as opposed to having sensible heat flux (i.e. positive air temperatures) which would quickly act to round of those sharp cliffs. So even though the air temperature above the glacier surface is below freezing there can still be melting along with sublimation. The ice walls also face mostly north/south which means that the cliffs are subject to a higher negative mass balance than the horizontal glacier surface, although the amount of ablation varies with seasons as solar heat flux changes. So when the sun is lower in the sky the walls undergo ablation through shortwave radiation even though the temperature is below freezing, the preferential ablation of the walls is what maintains the steep profile. Also, when the sun is higher in the sky, it corresponds to the rainy season there (I think) which means the surface is dominantly protected by clouds. I'm remembering this from a journal article a few years ago (Hardy was a coauthor on it), I'll try to find the paper again to see if I'm recalling the explanation correctly.
Little Rickie
New member
I thought I said that? 
erugs
New member
Did anyone see the Nova program last night called Becoming Human?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/e...-part-1.html?gclid=CMmfkNvP8Z0CFY915Qodh15uMQ
Here's a bit from the transcript in which it talks about the changing climate:
"NARRATOR: ...Here in Kenya they found some at the southern end of the Great Rift Valley. It's a hotbed of tectonic activity where ancient layers are forced to the surface.
Ten million years ago, Africa was a much wetter place, a tropical jungle which has been slowly drying out ever since.
But these rocks in Kenya show that Africa's gradual drying trend was punctuated by bursts of wild climate fluctuation. Rick Potts is an expert in reading the rocks.
RICK POTTS (Smithsonian Institution): This layer right here represents about a thousand years of environmental stability, but then we had an abrupt volcanic eruption, and then the lake was around for perhaps 500 years, before a drought, and the lake came back. So in some cases we saw this through layer after layer of environmental change.
NARRATOR: With his trained eye, Rick could see some layers were once lake beds, others desert sands, still others came from volcanic eruptions, a snapshot of a million years of climate history....the tendency of the environment to change.
NARRATOR: ...It's hard to believe, but these huge rock formations are made of the shells of tiny one-celled organisms called diatoms.
There are many different kinds, but they all live in water. Their shells collect in layers of rock that pile up over millions of years, proving that this whole valley was once a giant lake.
Annett Junginger analyzes these rock samples under the microscope.
ANNETT JUNGINGER (University of Potsdam): What I've discovered was that those white layers consist of a special kind of diatoms, which only live in deep lakes.
NARRATOR: But between the white layers she also finds other species of diatoms which only live in shallow water.
It means that in this spot, a massive lake appeared and disappeared and reappeared many times."
and towards the end:
RICK POTTS:The traditional idea we have had about human evolution is that it was the savannah, the grassy plane with some trees on it that was the driving force. But instead, what we've discovered is that climate changed all the time.
And so the idea that we've come up with is that variability itself was the driving force of human evolution, and that our ancestors were adapted to change itself.
NARRATOR: It is a simple but revolutionary idea: human evolution is nature's experiment with versatility. We're not adapted to any one environment or climate, but to many; we are creatures of climate change.
Tying this interesting program into the discussion above, Kilimanjaro and the region and the world are continuing to change. Will people still go to Tanzania for tourism if the glaciers continue to receed? Certainly. How many other of the worlds highest peaks are as attainable as this one? Tie that in with visiting a region with a different culture, one that is "homeland" or "birthplace" to us all. Will the local inhabitants lives change? Yes. Always has, always will. But I feel we will find a way to adapt.
I'm an optimist, can you tell?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/e...-part-1.html?gclid=CMmfkNvP8Z0CFY915Qodh15uMQ
Here's a bit from the transcript in which it talks about the changing climate:
"NARRATOR: ...Here in Kenya they found some at the southern end of the Great Rift Valley. It's a hotbed of tectonic activity where ancient layers are forced to the surface.
Ten million years ago, Africa was a much wetter place, a tropical jungle which has been slowly drying out ever since.
But these rocks in Kenya show that Africa's gradual drying trend was punctuated by bursts of wild climate fluctuation. Rick Potts is an expert in reading the rocks.
RICK POTTS (Smithsonian Institution): This layer right here represents about a thousand years of environmental stability, but then we had an abrupt volcanic eruption, and then the lake was around for perhaps 500 years, before a drought, and the lake came back. So in some cases we saw this through layer after layer of environmental change.
NARRATOR: With his trained eye, Rick could see some layers were once lake beds, others desert sands, still others came from volcanic eruptions, a snapshot of a million years of climate history....the tendency of the environment to change.
NARRATOR: ...It's hard to believe, but these huge rock formations are made of the shells of tiny one-celled organisms called diatoms.
There are many different kinds, but they all live in water. Their shells collect in layers of rock that pile up over millions of years, proving that this whole valley was once a giant lake.
Annett Junginger analyzes these rock samples under the microscope.
ANNETT JUNGINGER (University of Potsdam): What I've discovered was that those white layers consist of a special kind of diatoms, which only live in deep lakes.
NARRATOR: But between the white layers she also finds other species of diatoms which only live in shallow water.
It means that in this spot, a massive lake appeared and disappeared and reappeared many times."
and towards the end:
RICK POTTS:The traditional idea we have had about human evolution is that it was the savannah, the grassy plane with some trees on it that was the driving force. But instead, what we've discovered is that climate changed all the time.
And so the idea that we've come up with is that variability itself was the driving force of human evolution, and that our ancestors were adapted to change itself.
NARRATOR: It is a simple but revolutionary idea: human evolution is nature's experiment with versatility. We're not adapted to any one environment or climate, but to many; we are creatures of climate change.
Tying this interesting program into the discussion above, Kilimanjaro and the region and the world are continuing to change. Will people still go to Tanzania for tourism if the glaciers continue to receed? Certainly. How many other of the worlds highest peaks are as attainable as this one? Tie that in with visiting a region with a different culture, one that is "homeland" or "birthplace" to us all. Will the local inhabitants lives change? Yes. Always has, always will. But I feel we will find a way to adapt.
I'm an optimist, can you tell?
DougPaul
Well-known member
Saw part of it and recorded it so I will view the rest soon.
Note that all human-like species died out except one.
There are no guarantees for the long-term survival of Homo Sapiens...
And yes, I think Kili will remain an attraction for tourism even without the glaciers.
Doug
Nice photo of Furtwangler's snout. And, good explanation by Sheomet for oversteepened glacier snouts, which occur all over the world where calving is a dominant ablation process (example, tidewater glaciers, but also other mountaintop ice caps and valley glaciers in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica).
http://www.swisseduc.ch/glaciers/earth_icy_planet/glaciers03-en.html?id=13
http://www.whoi.edu/cms/images/oceanus/Ice-layers_550_59759.jpg
But, I do not like the NYT article, which continues a long trend in the NYT and the mainstream media to obfuscate the science behind AGW. Lonnie Thompson et al. are very clear in expressing their view that a dramatic warming not seen in at least 11,700 years is the predominant process behind the demise of ice caps on Kilimanjaro and elsewhere in the world over the last few decades, especially since 2000 when they initiated their mass balance surveys and retrieved ice cores on Kili. Whether the glacier ablation on Kili is melting, sublimation, calving, or the likely combination of all three, warming enhances all of these processes.
The second link above is the oversteepened margin of Quelccaya ice cap in Peru, which Lonnie Thompson cored in the late 1970s. Mark Bowen's book "Thin Ice" is a fine chronicle of Lonnie Thompson's career, which has included more time spent at high altitude than by any other human in history.
http://www.mark-bowen.com/book_ti.html
For Sindya Bhanoo to state that the authors of the PNAS article "reached no consensus on whether the melting [sic] could be attributed to humanity's role in warming the global climate" by citing an almost 6-year-old article by NYT's Andrew Revkin is disingenuous at the least. Thompson's recognition of melt layers near the tops but nowhere else in the 49-m length of his longest Kili ice core is difficult to dispute, in my view.
I also witnessed the limited meltwater when I climbed Kili in 1999, after I had met Lonnie Thompson a few days earlier at a conference in Durban following his reconnaissance for ice coring the next year. But, I think that with such small ice masses remaining now and the extremely permeable volcanic rock, accessibility of meltwater on the mountain will only worsen regardless of vegetation clearance and reduced cloud cover at the mountain's base. Better climb Kili while you can!
So are you a geologist or glaciologist?
Glacial geologist. Please say hello to Craig Lingle for me if he is still coming into the University (Geophysical Institute, retired last year, I think).
Send him an email; tell him that you want to see his Kodachrome slide show of their climb of the Kane Face on Robson back in the 1970s.
