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Mt. Kilimanjaro's Furtwängler Glacier in retreat
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A dramatic picture by Michael Nolan has been dubbed the face of 'Mother Nature crying' on a canvas of melting ice and cascading water on a Norwegian Glacier. But far south of the Arctic Circle, the Furtwängler Glacier atop Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa, continues to retreat rapidly according to a new report (.pdf) summarized in the NYT here:
Yet the authors of the study, to be published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reached no consensus on whether the melting could be attributed mainly to humanity’s role in warming the global climate. Eighty-five percent of the ice cover that was present in 1912 has vanished, the scientists said.
There are a number of ways a glacier can recede. It depends on temperature, rain or snowfall, topography, and internal heat. But basically it happens any time the rate of melt exceeds the rate of snowfall. The most obvious and alarming cause would be global climate change. But just as a single season does not a trend make, a single glacier is but one data point in the complex science of climatology. This glacier could be at risk simply due to lower snowfall or warmer ground -- after all Kilimanjaro is an old strato-volcano. Whatever the reason, the Furtwänglerhas lost half its size from 1976 thru 2000. This new report indicates that rate of loss has not abated.
This phenomena is being repeated all over the world. It's been well documented beginning around 1850 when the modern photography first became widely available.
Some, like the Boulder Glacier in Washington State (Shown right), has advanced and retreated in the last 150 years and appears to be receding again. It's pulled back a few hundred meters over several decades. Others, notably in Europe, have continuously receded, diminishing so much that they've changed the landscape. The Pasterize Glacier in Austria has pulled back so far since 1875 (Lower Left), that the entire valley would be almost unrecognizable to someone from that era today (Lower right). You look, you decide.
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