Massive glacier melt in Africa

Ernest Hemingway would have to think of a new novel title if he were to write his masterpiece "Snow on Kilimanjaro" today. A new study involving the University of Innsbruck shows that Africa's glaciers are melting in record time. They could be gone by the middle of the century.

The areas of ice on Mount Kenya, which is around 5,300 meters high, the Rwenzori Mountains, which are around 5,100 meters high, and Kilimanjaro, which is almost 6,000 meters high, have more than halved since the beginning of the 21st century.

The study

It was published in the journal "Environmental Research".

The content was the evaluation of high-resolution satellite images to close your gap, because there was no data from previous years, especially since the last measurements were carried out in 2005 on the Rwenzori Mountains, in 2011 on Kilimanjaro and in 2016 on Mount Kenya

90 percent of the glaciers have disappeared

According to Anne Hinzmann from the University of Erlängen-Nuremberg, around 90 percent of the glacier areas have actually disappeared since the first mapping at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

According to the study, the three tropical glacier regions are so high that the glacier retreat there is not due to rising temperatures as in the Alps.

Only the change in precipitation is responsible for the large melt.

The rainy seasons have been drier and drier since the end of the 19th century. This lack of precipitation has caused the glaciers to shrink even at sub-zero temperatures.