“The famed snows of Kilimanjaro may soon appear only in old tourist photos”. It has been predicted that the snowy mountaintops of Earth’s largest and tallest mountains, such as Kilimanjaro, will soon melt away. The article states, “the warming climate of recent decades has caused high-altitude glaciers worldwide, and especially those in tropical areas, to shrink substantially”. Over one quarter of the ice that was once present has now melted away since 2000. Kilimanjaro’s snow has been melting dramatically over the decades on continues to get worse. The annual rate of ice loss recorded in 2007 was 2.4 percent compared to 1950 which was 1.1 percent then 1.4 percent in 1980. Kilimanjaro has lost approximately 5.1 of ice thickness. The ice used to reflect the sun’s heat but now the suns heat is being absorbed by the dark rocks of the mountain that lie underneath the ice. So the mountain is heating up and the snow is melting even quicker.
It was reported that the ice only started melting in recent decades, which possibly means that the melting of Kilimanjaro could be a result of global warming. The issue that derives from this is that some of the runoff water that was created from the snow will no longer be available. Thankfully there are alternatives and the society in the regions are not dependent on Kilimanjaro’s snow. Therefore there is no serious damage done by the melting of the snow on Kilimanjaro but “lessons learned from field studies there could help scientists better predict when glaciers elsewhere in the tropics — many of which people depend on for water — will eventually disappear.”
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