Mount Kilimanjaro's Snowcap Vanishing Fast

For those who visit Kenya on a photo safari, it is hard to know a more majestic sight than the snows of Kilimanjaro. Those snows were made famous by Ernest Hemingway, but those snows are disappearing.

It is hard to deny the obvious decline in the whiteness capping Mt. Kilimanjaro. In fact, researchers led by paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the sadness of that truth.

According to the report, some 85 percent of the ice that made up the mountaintop glaciers in 1912 was gone by 2007. Showing the incraesing speed of climate change, more than a quarter of the ice present in 2000 was gone by 2007.

Thompson made the following statement: "The fact that so many glaciers throughout the tropics and subtropics are showing similar responses suggests an underlying common cause. The increase of Earth's near surface temperatures, coupled with even greater increases in the mid- to upper-tropical troposphere, as documented in recent decades, would at least partially explain the observations."

Researchers said that Kilimanjaro's northern ice field lost 6.2 feet (1.9 meters), while the southern ice field lost 16.7 feet (5.1 meters) between 2000 and 2007. The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.