E&E News: Mount Speke — once one of the highest snowcapped peaks of Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains, with 536 acres of ice coverage — has been reduced to a dismal 46 acres, according to the Climate Change Unit at Uganda’s ministry of water and environment, which blames global warming for the melting.
Satellite images taken in 1987 and 2005 show that much of the disappearance occurred over the past two decades. Uganda’s National Environmental Management Authority predicts that if melting continues at the current rate, the ice will be gone by 2023.
“The ice is literally disappearing. In some cases it has disappeared, and I am more than certain that this is a result of global warming,” said Philip Gagwe, who heads the Climate Change Unit.
The drastic melting has adversely effected agriculture and health in surrounding populations (Ben Simon, Agence France-Presse/Yahoo! News, June 15).
Argentina’s Perito Moreno glacier remains unfazed, despite rising temperatures that are threatening ice fields worldwide.
The 3-mile-wide glacier grows continuously with nourishment from Andean snowmelt until it expands enough to touch a point of land across Lake Argentina, forcing a massive ice dam that bursts from the pressure of mounting water. The cycle, which occurs every few years, has maintained a nearly perfect equilibrium since measurements began more than a century ago.
“We’re not sure why this happens,” said Andres Rivera, a glacialist with the Center for Scientific Studies in Valdivia, Chile. “But not all glaciers respond equally to climate change” (Jeannette Nuemann, AP/San Francisco Chronicle, June 15). – LZ
