Don't worry Hemingway, the snows of Kilimanjaro aren't melting because of deforestation.
Climate scientists from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, found that changes in land cover didn't have a major influence on glacier cover on Kilimanjaro, a massive extinct volcano in northeast Tanzania and Africa's highest mountain.
"We used Kilimanjaro in East Africa as a test case, where a significant decrease of forests at elevations between 1,800 and 3,000 meters, caused by illegal deforestation and an increased number of forest fires, has been documented since the 1970s," said study co-author Thomas Mölg in a press release.
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Direct measurements of Kilimanjaro's temperature, humidity, radiation, precipitation and glacier mass changes were used to create a model designed to look for correlations between deforestation and glacial melting.
"Depending on the season, LCC [land cover change] contributes not more than seven to seventeen percent to glacier mass loss in the southern sector. We, therefore, cannot confirm the hypothesis that deforestation at Kilimanjaro contributes significantly to glacier loss," said Mölg.
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A warming climate causes the majority of Kilimanjaro's glacial melt. But the study did suggest deforestation reduces rainfall and reduces drinking and irrigation water supplies for humans.
"However, another important aspect of the results is that deforestation decreases precipitation significantly more in mid-mountain elevation zones about two kilometers below the glacier than in summit zones," said Mölg.
The research was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
IMAGE:
Mount Kilimanjaro from the air (Paul Shaffner, Wikimedia Commons)
Tags: Climate Change, Glaciers, Volcanoes, Water
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