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JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) – From Germany’s southern border to the highest peaks in Africa, glaciers around the world have served as money-making tourist attractions, natural climate records for scientists, and beacons of faith for indigenous groups.
With many glaciers melting rapidly due to climate change, the disappearance of the ice sheets will deal a blow to countries and communities that have relied on them for generations – to generate electricity, attract visitors, and maintain ancient spiritual traditions.
The ice masses that have formed from compacted snow over thousands of years have been melting since the Industrial Revolution, a process that has accelerated in recent years.
The retreat can be seen in Africa, on the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the rugged peaks of the Ruwenzori Mountains tower into the sky above a green jungle. The peaks once contained more than 40 glaciers, but by 2005 fewer than half of them remained and the melting continues. Experts believe that the last glacier in the mountains could disappear within 20 years.
The disappearance means trouble for inland Uganda, which gets almost half of its electricity from hydropower, including the power plants that rely on the steady flow of water from the Rwenzori glaciers.
“This hydropower works much better in more regular currents than in peaks and troughs,” said Richard Taylor, professor of hydrogeology at University College London.
One continent away, on the southern edge of the German border with Austria, only half a square kilometer of ice remains on five glaciers. Experts estimate that this is 88% less than the amount of ice that existed around 1850, and that the remaining glaciers will melt in 10 to 15 years.
This is bad news for the regional tourism industry, which is dependent on the glaciers, said Christoph Mayer, senior scientist in the geodesy and glaciology working group at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich.
“At the moment, travel agencies can advertise: ‘You can visit one of the highest mountains in Germany with glaciers. You can go for a walk on the glaciers, ‘”said Mayer. “The people who live in these regions really make a living from tourism … it will have an impact on them if they lose these glaciers.”
The same problem faces Tanzania, where experts estimate that Kilimanjaro – the highest mountain in Africa and one of the country’s top tourist attractions – has lost about 90% of its glacial ice through melting and sublimation, a process in which solid ice evaporates directly without going liquid first. Travel and tourism accounted for 10.7% of the country’s GDP in 2019.
There are also immaterial losses for many indigenous communities who live within sight of glaciers, said Rainer Prinz, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
In local history, “the ice in the mountains is the seat of God. It has a very spiritual meaning, ”he said of the communities near Kilimanjaro. “The loss of the glaciers there would also have an impact on the spiritual life, I think.”
The ice sheets that make up a glacier can be tens of thousands of years old and contain information about past climatic conditions year after year, including atmospheric composition, temperature fluctuations, and existing vegetation types. Researchers take long, tubular ice cores from glaciers to “read” these layers.
During a 2010 research trip to the Carstensz Glacier in Indonesia’s western Papua province, oceanographer Dwi Raden Susanto was delighted to be part of a team that collected a core sample from the remote glaciers. But once the sample was taken, Susanto said, the scientists quickly realized that the rapid retreat of the ice allowed them to obtain records that only date back to the 1960s.
“It is sad because it is not only a loss of local or national heritage for Indonesia, but also a loss of climate heritage for the world,” said Susanto.
As the glaciers disappear, experts say, the local ecosystems will change too – something that is already being studied at the Humboldt Glacier in Venezuela that could disappear within the next two decades.
Experts warn that the fate of smaller glaciers is a warning to larger glaciers.
For example, while many of the world’s smaller glaciers no longer serve as primary sources of freshwater for countries, some larger glaciers still do, including in Peru, which lost nearly 30% of its glacier mass between 2000 and 2016, said Lauren Vargo, a research fellow at the Antarctic Research Center in Wellington, New Zealand.
“These communities are much more dependent on glaciers for water for their communities,” she said.
Increasing melt will also lead to rising sea levels and changes in weather patterns – something that will affect society on a global scale, Mayer said.
“The disappearance of these little glaciers really is a warning sign for the future,” he said. It “should make you aware that something is going on that isn’t just peanuts.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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