The woes of Kilimanjaro

The fabled glaciers on Tanzania's majestic mountain will soon be gone. Its forests are disappearing, too. For local farmers, this could mean disaster. For the rest of us, it's another unbearable loss on an overheating planet.

Editor's note: Early Signs: Reports From a Warming Planet is a joint project of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Salon and NPR's "Living on Earth." The series runs Fridays through May 5 in Salon, and you can find radio versions of each story on "Living on Earth's" Web site. Read about how the series came into being here.

By Kate Cheney Davidson

Read more: Politics, News, Africa, Global Warming, Early Signs: Reports from a Warming Planet

April 28, 2006 | KIFURU JUU, Tanzania -- This is not the place William Kiwali remembers from when he was a child. A thin man with good posture and stained teeth, Kiwali gestures to the steep hillside below him, where rows of parched cornstalks lean at oblique angles, brown and shriveled under the equatorial sun. "Our corn is very dry now," says Kiwali, "because the winter rains did not come." This is the third year his community has gone without the crucial late-autumn rains. A generation ago, the area was characterized by reliable rain, thick fog and generous streams. "The rivers were full," Kiwali says, and his family's coffee, corn and bananas thrived. Now the rains are irregular, many streams run dry, and the corn, a staple food for Kiwali and his neighbors, doesn't thrive as it once did.

Kiwali looks over his shoulder at the sleeping volcano, which looms more than 14,000 feet above his village of Kifuru Juu, just half a mile from the trekkers' paradise of Kilimanjaro National Park. For over 250 years the legendary snows, rains and forests of Mount Kilimanjaro have sustained families living along the verdant slopes in the mountain's rain shadow. Now, Kifuru Juu and hundreds of other communities that blanket the mountainside are suffering from the changes to their environment. "When I was little, there was a lot of snow on the mountain," Kiwali says. "Now there's not much snow and the water has dried out."

Within the next 15 years, the glaciers atop Kilimanjaro are expected to disappear completely, and with them, some climate experts and government officials fear, a crucial portion of the region's water supply. Over 1 million people who inhabit the lower reaches of Kilimanjaro, including Kiwali and his neighbors, depend on this water for their crops, livestock and domestic purposes. Conflicts over water shortages have already broken out between water users on the mountain, and some villages have been nearly cut off by their upstream neighbors. With declining precipitation levels driving glaciers toward extinction and threatening the area's forests, scientists, environmental organizations and even the Tanzanian government are turning their attention to a complex set of questions: How will water resources, and the humans who depend on them, respond if the ice and trees disappear? What will happen as the world's carbon levels continue to rise? For researchers and policymakers, the answers to these questions may be of academic interest or political concern, but for people like William Kiwali they are a matter of survival.

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Bouncing along a rutted dirt road lined with flat-topped acacia trees, renowned climatologist and Ohio State University professor Lonnie Thompson looks out of place in his chinos and running shoes. Thompson is internationally known for his ambitious expeditions to extract ice-core samples from some of the highest glaciers on earth, and for his no-nonsense talk about climate change. "The tropics are an extremely important area to understand for two basic reasons," says Thompson. "For one, you've got 50 percent of the surface area of the planet in the tropics, and two, 70 percent of the earth's 6.5 billion people live there. So you really need to understand natural climate variability in this area, as well as the human-induced changes that are taking place."

Kilimanjaro's glaciers have fascinated explorers and scientists for centuries, but only recently have scientists begun to take detailed, quantitative measurements of the glaciers' retreat. This is Thompson's third expedition to study Kilimanjaro's glaciers in the last seven years. "This trip we'll be spending about 20 days up there," he says, lowering his head to get a better view of the ice-capped summit through the Land Cruiser's dusty front windshield.

Located 200 miles south of the equator and rising more than 3 miles above the dry plains of northern Tanzania, Mount Kilimanjaro comprises three separate volcanoes. The tallest of the three, Kibo, stretches 19,340 feet above sea level and wears a crown of glaciers. When German geographer Hans Meyer made the first documented ascent of the peak in 1889, the glaciers dominated Kibo's crest. Today, they cover less than 1 square mile, about a tenth the area they covered in Meyer's time. Some glaciologists predict they will disappear entirely in the next 10 to 15 years, and Thompson says it could even happen sooner.

In 2002, Thompson and 10 of his colleagues published an article in the journal Science. The paper confirmed what many already knew: that Kilimanjaro's famous cap of glacial ice is shrinking rapidly, with nearly 80 percent having disappeared between 1912 and 2000. What stunned readers, as well as the Tanzanian government, was that the article gave the glaciers an expiration date. Based on six ice cores drilled to bedrock and a comparison of aerial photos of the summit dating back to the early 20th century, Thompson and his colleagues concluded that "the disappearance of Kilimanjaro's ice fields, expected between 2015 and 2020, will be unprecedented for the Holocene." In other words, not since the birth of the glaciers almost 12 millennia ago have the glaciers been in danger of disappearing -- until now.

Before the fabled snows of Kilimanjaro fade, glaciologists like Thompson are in a race against time to understand fully the glaciers' response to climate change. On this trip, Thompson and his team of researchers will document changes to the summit glaciers and collect water samples from various points on the mountain, to determine how much glacial water is present at different elevations. "If you go back 100 years on this mountain," says Thompson, pointing out the window at the broad-shouldered massif, "the whole summit was covered with glaciers. Since then, they've been retreating, and that water's being discharged into the groundwater system. So it's possible that a lot of water currently being consumed is older than 100 years, in which case the loss of the glaciers could have a very important impact on water supplies in this region."

And the problem goes beyond Kilimanjaro. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-sponsored research group composed of thousands of international experts, warns that key forest-health factors like runoff and soil moisture will be adversely affected throughout Africa as a result of global warming.

It's early afternoon, and the Land Cruiser ferrying Thompson's group has climbed far above the savannah, through a wide swath of cultivated land and up into the park itself. Above the forest belt, giant purplish heathers reach out across the road to sweep the truck's sides. Thompson and his team perk up as the cool mountain air moves over their flushed faces.

Julius Minja sits in the front seat of the Land Cruiser, chatting with the driver in Swahili as the vehicle jostles its way up the last section of road. Minja is one of the most experienced climbing guides on Kilimanjaro and has served as lead guide on all three of Lonnie Thompson's expeditions. At 45 years old, he has visited the summit of the mountain over 800 times in a 15-year period, and witnessed drastic changes to the mountain's ice fields. Now, he says, much of the ice has disappeared. "When people ask me about the changes on the glaciers," Minja explains, "I can put a map there, and show them. Do you see the glacier [I ask them]? This glacier used to be there, but just the name is left, nothing more."

Next page: Kilimanjaro may lose all its high-altitude forests at the same time its glaciers disappear