Climate change
Study: Africa’s glaciers are shrinking sharply
The rainy seasons are becoming increasingly drier in Africa. This means less ice can form and the glaciers are shrinking.
For the study, experts from the universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Otago in New Zealand, Massachusetts in the USA and Innsbruck in Austria evaluated high-resolution satellite images. The group has thus closed a gap because there was no data from previous years, said Anne Hinzmann from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. The last measurements were taken in 2005 on the Ruwenzori Mountains, in 2011 on Kilimanjaro and in 2016 on Mount Kenya.
According to the new analysis, it was shown that the largest ice area in Africa on Kilimanjaro had decreased from 11.4 square kilometers in 1900 to 0.98 square kilometers between 2021 and 2022. On Mount Kenya the ice shrank from 1.64 square kilometers in 1899 to 0.07 square kilometers in 2021/2022, in the Rwenzori Mountains from 6.51 square kilometers in 1906 to 0.38 square kilometers in 2021/2022. “Since the glacier areas were first mapped at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, more than 90 percent of their areas have disappeared,” explained Hinzmann.
According to the study, the three tropical glacier regions are so high that the retreat of ice there, in contrast to the Alps, for example, cannot be directly attributed to rising temperatures in the areas. However, changes in precipitation play an important role. It was said that the rainy seasons have been drier since the end of the 19th century, so that less ice forms and the glacier retreats. There are also more cloudless days on which sunshine can melt the ice even when the temperature is below zero.