Kilimanjaro Ice Field Shrinks and Splits Another ominous sign
that Mount Kilimanjaro's ice fields may disappear in 50 years
has emerged. What was once the largest remaining ice field on
Kilimanjaro shrank and separated into two pieces, a research
expedition discovered in September. The summit's northern ice
field now has a rift large enough to ride a bike through,
Kimberly Casey, a glaciologist based at NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center, told NASA's Earth Observatory. The gap is visible
in an image acquired by the Advanced Land Imager on NASA's Earth
Observing-1 satellite on Oct. 26 and in panoramic images Casey
captured during the research expedition. Kilimanjaro, in
Tanzania, is Africa's highest peak — 19,341 feet (5,895 meters)
— and harbors three distinct ice fields: One on its western
slope and two within the summit plateau. The northern ice field
first started developing a hole in 1970. The ice cover on the
volcano's western slopes will disappear by 2020, and the ice
fields in the plateau will be gone