Leaving the farmed slopes of the village, we crossed the edge of the park and soon entered the tropical forest, where jewel-like flowers peeked out from beneath giant ferns and monkeys materialized and disappeared as mist filtered through the canopies. hardwood buttresses. We hiked through the bamboo forest, climbing to 12,800 feet (3,900 meters), where we entered the otherworldly world. afroalpine moorscontaining endemic, endangered and rare species.
For two days we jumped from clumps of grass to slippery tree roots, through bogs of fluffy moss and silent streams. Beards of lichen waved from the branches of giant heather. Red Rwenzori Duikers, a endangered subspecies Antelope-like, it stared out from dense thickets of papery-silver evergreens.
The plants, uniquely adapted to their habitat, became stranger the higher we went. Giant terranes dotted the valley floors. Their spiky green pompoms make them look like palm trees, but their furry coats of dead leaves keep them warm.
As the planet warms, plants and animals move uphill in the Rwenzoris, as they do elsewhere, in search of cooler temperatures. But there is only as far as they can go. Eventually, “they’ll just work their way up from the top of the mountain,” said Sarah Ivory, a researcher at Penn State.
“Now you find rock hyrax tracks in the glaciers,” Bwambale said as we walked. “Same for duikers.”
On the fifth day, we noticed some changes of our own. Holding up one of Sella’s photos to compare it to the current landscape, we discovered that a glacier-fed pond located in the valley between Mount Baker and Mount Stanley had dwindled to almost nothing.
the three tallest points in Africa have lost dramatic amounts of ice in the past century, reports a paper 2019 published in geosciences. On Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest point in Africa, the ice has shrunk by 90 percent since its first survey in 1912, to less than 1 square mile. The glaciers of Mount Kenya, the second highest peak in Africa, are less than a tenth of a square mile. Glaciers on the Rwenzoris, much less studied, covered about 2.5 square miles in 1906; in 2003, they covered less than 1 square mile. Today, they are even smaller.
Although glaciers are retreating everywhere, the causes are different from place to place. In the Rwenzoris, where glaciers form at a relatively low elevation of 4,400 meters (14,400 feet), the problem is warming of the air. The mountains, whose name means “rainmaker” in the local language, receive 6 to 10 feet of precipitation a year, so the glaciers aren’t running out of water, they’re just melting faster than the rain. you can freeze and replace melted ice. However, on Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, where the ice is found at higher elevations, rainfall has decreased. Here the ice is evaporating in the dry air.
Whatever the cause, high-altitude ice is disappearing everywhere, a trend that will continue as global warming accelerates the rate of change in mountain ecosystems, cryospheric systems, hydrological regimes, and biodiversity. according the Mountain Research Initiative.