This June 2009 photo of Mount Kilimanjaro by Stephen Morrison of the European Pressphoto Agency, the clearly highlights the absence of large glaciers. Climate change and forest depletion near the storied mountain that rises nearly four miles above the shimmering plains of Tanzania are both blamed for the melt-off.
The majestic glacial cap of 11,000-year-old ice has long captured imaginations of scientists and environmemtalists the world over. Six ice cores taken from Mount Kilimanjaro glaciers provide an 11.7-thousand-year record of Holocene climate and environmental variability for eastern equatorial Africa, including three periods of abrupt climate change: 8.3, 5.2, and 4 thousand years ago, with latter is coincident with the “First Dark Age,” the period of the greatest historically recorded drought in tropical Africa. Over the 20th century, the areal extent of Kilimanjaro’s ice fields has decreased 80%, and if current climatological conditions persist, the shrinking ice fields are likely to disappear between 2015 and 2020.
A new 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 according to the New York Times. Approximately 85 percent of the ice cover that was present in 1912 has vanished, scientists said.
Casey Kazan
Sources:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/298/5593/589?ijkey=WhFFa/hp06CUc&keytype=ref&siteid=sci
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/world/africa/03melt.html
0 comentários:
Enviar um comentário