Leaving the village’s cultivated hillside, we crossed the park boundary and quickly entered the rainforest. There, jewel-like blossoms peeped out from beneath giant ferns, monkeys materialized, and mist disappeared as it sifted through hardened hardwoods. We trekked through bamboo groves to an altitude of 3,900 meters (12,800 feet). There, enter the otherworldly Afro-Alpine wilderness, home to endemic, endangered, and rare species.
For two days, we made our way from grass to slippery tree roots through spongy moss marshes and quiet streams. A lichen beard fluttered from the branches of a huge heather tree. The Rwenzori Red Duiker, an endangered species of antelope, gazed out from dense thickets of everlasting papery silver.
The plants, uniquely adapted to their habitat, got stranger as we climbed. The bottom of the valley was dotted with giant burdocks. Its spiky green pom-poms look like palm trees, but its shaggy coat of dead leaves protects it from the cold.
As the earth warms, plants and animals, as elsewhere, will migrate up the Rwenzolis slopes in search of cooler temperatures. However, the distance they can go is limited. Ultimately, “they will take a step off the top of the mountain,” said Sarah Ivory, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University.
“Now we see rock hyrax tracks on the glacier,” said Bwambare while hiking. “Same with Dyker”
On the fifth day, we noticed some changes in ourselves. Lifting one of Sella’s photographs and comparing it to today’s landscape reveals that the glacier-fed pond in the valley between Mount Baker and Mount Stanley had shrunk to almost nothing. got it.
three of the best All of Africa’s points have lost dramatic amounts of ice over the past 100 years, reports a 2019 paper. Earth scienceThe ice on Tanzania’s highest mountain in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro, has shrunk by 90% since the first survey in 1912 to less than a square mile. The glacier on Mount Kenya, his second highest mountain in Africa, is less than a tenth of a square mile. The little-studied Rwenzolis glacier covered an estimated 2.5 square miles in 1906. In 2003, it covered less than 1 square mile. Today they are even smaller.
Glaciers are retreating everywhere, but for different reasons. Warm air is a problem at Rwenzolis, where the glacier is relatively low at 14,400 feet (4,400 m). The mountains, whose name means ‘the one who brings rain’ in the local language, receive 6 to 10 feet of precipitation per year, so the glaciers never run out of water. It’s just melting faster than the rain can freeze and replace the melted ice. However, on Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya, ice forms at higher elevations and reduces precipitation. Here, ice evaporates into dry air.
Whatever the cause, high-altitude ice is disappearing out of nowhere. This trend will continue as global warming accelerates the rate of change in mountain ecosystems, cryospheric systems, hydrological regimes and biodiversity, according to the Mountain Research Initiative.
