Meanwhile: The what of Kilimanjaro?

Meanwhile: The what of Kilimanjaro?

OliverMortonNYT

Wednesday, November 19, 2003


LONDON -- The green-gold expanse of savanna; above it, the
purple horizon-hiding haze; and above that, like a pyramid
improbably suspended in the sky, the snows of Kilimanjaro.

"Great, high and unbelievably white in the sun," as Hemingway
wrote, the continent of Africa - some would say our planet
itself - has hardly anything to show more fair.

But the show could soon be over. The summit of Kilimanjaro is
losing its ice so quickly that it could be barren dirt before
the next decade is out. When the ice goes, it will take with it
an irreplaceable 10-millennium record of the African climate, a
profitable tourist attraction and a source of beauty that is a
joy to contemplate.

At first sight, the loss of Kilimanjaro's ice doesn't look like
the sort of thing anyone could do much to stop. The mountain's
year-round ice is mostly to be found in a handful of fields
around the volcano's central crater.

Though snow comes and goes from the mountain's flanks with the
seasons, these summit ice fields have been shrinking for more
than a century; from 1912 to 2000 four-fifths of their area
vanished.

It is not clear that global warming is responsible for this
precipitous retreat (retreating glaciers elsewhere, like those
in the Alps, offer much more convincing smoking guns). But that
does not clear humans of blame.

After all, it is reasonably suspicious that, after persisting
for more than a hundred centuries, the ice began to vanish in
the very century in which humans started to change the
environment both globally and, perhaps more important, locally.
It may well be that a regional change of some sort -
deforestation, in all likelihood - has dried out the moist,
rising winds that used to replenish the ice.

The question of what is destroying the ice, though, is less
pressing than the question of whether anything can be done to
save it. And the surprising answer to the second question is
yes. You see, the two main ice fields on top of Kilimanjaro are
big flat slabs with clifflike faces.

According to scientists studying the mountain, it is melting
from these cliffs - rather than from the flat tops of the fields
- that seems to be the key to the problem.

Reading about this, Euan Nisbet, a Zimbabwean greenhouse gas
specialist at the Royal Holloway College, University of London,
was struck by a fairly simple solution: drape the cliffs in
white polypropylene fabric. Sunlight bounces off, and the ice
below stays cool. The result would look like a giant washing
line: God's crisp, white sheets aired out three miles up in the
sky.

Nisbet, whose family tree is thick with foresters, stresses that
he doesn't see this as a permanent solution - but it would buy
some decades, even a century, during which ways could be found
to develop reforestation plans good for the mountain and the
people who live beneath it.

The task of protecting the ice, while monumental, would not be
impossible; the relatively small size of the ice fields is,
after all, the whole point. In principle it would be well within
the grasp of the world's grandmaster wrapper, Christo. "Running
Fence," the Christo masterpiece that snaked through 25 miles of
Sonoma and Marin counties in California for a couple of weeks in
1976, would be easily long enough to girdle the two main ice
fields.

Given that the cliffs are 60 to 150 feet high, their covering
would have to be taller than "Running Fence"; but the total
amount of fabric required would probably be no greater than that
used for the bright pink skirts Christo spread out around the
islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay in 1983.

Indeed, Christo and his wife and partner, Jeanne-Claude, would
make good consultants for the project; the team that persuaded
German parliamentarians to let them wrap the Reichstag might
well persuade the Tanzanian government to allow the same thing
to be done to the country's best-known feature. Getting hundreds
of thousands of square yards of fabric to the mountain top would
be fairly easy - pack it up tightly and throw it out the back of
a transport plane. Hanging it off the ice cliffs would be
tricky, and require a lot of help. But it is hard to imagine
that, if the money for such a project were to be found, the
volunteers would not come running from around the world. And
once the hanging is done, the main job would be over.

The rest of the preservation effort might just consist of a few
snow machines to keep the top surface fresh and white in the
months when no snow falls. The fresher the ice the more sunlight
it reflects; the less light absorbed, the less the ice will
melt.

The effort to preserve a square mile of ice in the equatorial
sky could become a powerful local and universal symbol. Cloaking
the ice cliffs of Kilimanjaro would not just borrow the
techniques of an art installation - it would be a work of art in
itself. Done properly, it would be a preservation of beauty that
is itself, beautiful.

What's more, preserving the ice would be a way of saying that we
do not have to accept environmental change, even when it looks
inevitable.

The white tarps would float above the clouds a tentative hope:
the hope that human will and ingenuity just might be able to
meet the challenges of a century in which more change will be
faced, and more protection needed, than at any other time in
human history - or Kilimanjaro's.

The writer is author of "Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and
the Birth of a World."

Copyright C 2002 TheInternationalHeraldTribune

--
No mail, please.

From my recent experience, its very much 'The dust of Kilimanjaro' these
days.
At the end of the dry season, its like walking on the moon! (or so I would
imagine)

I fear that protecting the ice is not a real option - you can't fight nature
(it would be like trying to reroute a river). If the ice goes, then it goes.
However, it would change the challenge, and those who had been up there
with the cliffs would have something to tell their children.

While we (humans) may be responsible for altering the surface of the planet,
we will onlyl ever really affect the flora and fauna. Even if, heaven
forbid, we press the button or let loose irretrievable levels of toxins etc,
it is only ourselves who will suffer. The planet itself will recover in due
course and another life form will take over (probably insects knowing our
luck...)

--

Charles
www.wildviews.com
Natural History Photography


"Hans-Georg Michna" wrote in message
...
Meanwhile: The what of Kilimanjaro?

OliverMortonNYT

Wednesday, November 19, 2003


LONDON -- The green-gold expanse of savanna; above it, the
purple horizon-hiding haze; and above that, like a pyramid
improbably suspended in the sky, the snows of Kilimanjaro.

"Great, high and unbelievably white in the sun," as Hemingway
wrote, the continent of Africa - some would say our planet
itself - has hardly anything to show more fair.

But the show could soon be over. The summit of Kilimanjaro is
losing its ice so quickly that it could be barren dirt before
the next decade is out. When the ice goes, it will take with it
an irreplaceable 10-millennium record of the African climate, a
profitable tourist attraction and a source of beauty that is a
joy to contemplate.

At first sight, the loss of Kilimanjaro's ice doesn't look like
the sort of thing anyone could do much to stop. The mountain's
year-round ice is mostly to be found in a handful of fields
around the volcano's central crater.

Though snow comes and goes from the mountain's flanks with the
seasons, these summit ice fields have been shrinking for more
than a century; from 1912 to 2000 four-fifths of their area
vanished.

It is not clear that global warming is responsible for this
precipitous retreat (retreating glaciers elsewhere, like those
in the Alps, offer much more convincing smoking guns). But that
does not clear humans of blame.

After all, it is reasonably suspicious that, after persisting
for more than a hundred centuries, the ice began to vanish in
the very century in which humans started to change the
environment both globally and, perhaps more important, locally.
It may well be that a regional change of some sort -
deforestation, in all likelihood - has dried out the moist,
rising winds that used to replenish the ice.

The question of what is destroying the ice, though, is less
pressing than the question of whether anything can be done to
save it. And the surprising answer to the second question is
yes. You see, the two main ice fields on top of Kilimanjaro are
big flat slabs with clifflike faces.

According to scientists studying the mountain, it is melting
from these cliffs - rather than from the flat tops of the fields
- that seems to be the key to the problem.

Reading about this, Euan Nisbet, a Zimbabwean greenhouse gas
specialist at the Royal Holloway College, University of London,
was struck by a fairly simple solution: drape the cliffs in
white polypropylene fabric. Sunlight bounces off, and the ice
below stays cool. The result would look like a giant washing
line: God's crisp, white sheets aired out three miles up in the
sky.

Nisbet, whose family tree is thick with foresters, stresses that
he doesn't see this as a permanent solution - but it would buy
some decades, even a century, during which ways could be found
to develop reforestation plans good for the mountain and the
people who live beneath it.

The task of protecting the ice, while monumental, would not be
impossible; the relatively small size of the ice fields is,
after all, the whole point. In principle it would be well within
the grasp of the world's grandmaster wrapper, Christo. "Running
Fence," the Christo masterpiece that snaked through 25 miles of
Sonoma and Marin counties in California for a couple of weeks in
1976, would be easily long enough to girdle the two main ice
fields.

Given that the cliffs are 60 to 150 feet high, their covering
would have to be taller than "Running Fence"; but the total
amount of fabric required would probably be no greater than that
used for the bright pink skirts Christo spread out around the
islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay in 1983.

Indeed, Christo and his wife and partner, Jeanne-Claude, would
make good consultants for the project; the team that persuaded
German parliamentarians to let them wrap the Reichstag might
well persuade the Tanzanian government to allow the same thing
to be done to the country's best-known feature. Getting hundreds
of thousands of square yards of fabric to the mountain top would
be fairly easy - pack it up tightly and throw it out the back of
a transport plane. Hanging it off the ice cliffs would be
tricky, and require a lot of help. But it is hard to imagine
that, if the money for such a project were to be found, the
volunteers would not come running from around the world. And
once the hanging is done, the main job would be over.

The rest of the preservation effort might just consist of a few
snow machines to keep the top surface fresh and white in the
months when no snow falls. The fresher the ice the more sunlight
it reflects; the less light absorbed, the less the ice will
melt.

The effort to preserve a square mile of ice in the equatorial
sky could become a powerful local and universal symbol. Cloaking
the ice cliffs of Kilimanjaro would not just borrow the
techniques of an art installation - it would be a work of art in
itself. Done properly, it would be a preservation of beauty that
is itself, beautiful.

What's more, preserving the ice would be a way of saying that we
do not have to accept environmental change, even when it looks
inevitable.

The white tarps would float above the clouds a tentative hope:
the hope that human will and ingenuity just might be able to
meet the challenges of a century in which more change will be
faced, and more protection needed, than at any other time in
human history - or Kilimanjaro's.

The writer is author of "Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and
the Birth of a World."

Copyright C 2002 TheInternationalHeraldTribune

--
No mail, please.