Leaving the cultivated hillsides of the village, we crossed the park border and shortly entered tropical forest, the place jewel-like flowers peered out from beneath large ferns and monkeys materialized and vanished as mist sieved via buttressed hardwoods. We trekked via bamboo forest, climbing to 12,800 toes (3,900 meters), the place we entered the otherworldly Afro-Alpine moorlands, which comprise endemic, endangered, and uncommon species.
For 2 days we leapt from grassy tussocks to slippery tree roots, via bogs of spongy moss and silent rivulets. Beards of lichen waved from the branches of large heather bushes. Rwenzori purple duikers, an endangered subspecies of antelope, stared from dense thickets of papery silver everlastings.
The vegetation, uniquely tailored to their habitat, received weirder as we climbed. Big groundsels dotted the valley flooring. Their spiky inexperienced pom-poms make them appear like palm bushes, however their shaggy coats of lifeless leaves protected them from the chilly.
Because the planet warms, vegetation and animals are transferring upslope within the Rwenzoris, as they’re elsewhere, searching for cooler temperatures. However there’s solely up to now they will go. Ultimately, “they are going to simply step their method off the highest of the mountain,” mentioned Sarah Ivory, a researcher at Penn State.
“You discover rock hyrax footprints on the glaciers now,” Bwambale mentioned as we hiked. “The identical for the duikers.”
On the fifth day, we famous some adjustments of our personal. Holding up one in all Sella’s pictures to match it to right now’s panorama, we found {that a} glacier-fed pond nestled within the valley between Mount Baker and Mount Stanley had shrunk to nearly nothing.
The three highest factors in Africa have all misplaced dramatic quantities of ice up to now century, stories a 2019 paper printed in Geosciences. On Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, the best level in Africa, the ice has shrunk by 90 % since its first survey in 1912, to lower than 1 sq. mile. The glaciers on Mount Kenya, Africa’s second highest peak, are lower than a tenth of a sq. mile. Glaciers within the far much less studied Rwenzoris coated an estimated 2.5 sq. miles in 1906; in 2003, they coated lower than 1 sq. mile. Right this moment, they’re even smaller.
Whereas glaciers are retreating all over the place, the causes are completely different from place to put. Within the Rwenzoris, the place glaciers happen at a comparatively low 14,400 toes (4,400 meters), warming air is the issue. The mountains, whose title means “rain maker” within the native language, obtain 6 to 10 toes of precipitation a yr, so the glaciers usually are not being starved of water—they’re simply melting sooner than rain can freeze and change the melted ice. Nevertheless, on Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, the place the ice happens at greater elevations, precipitation has declined. Right here the ice is evaporating into the dry air.
Regardless of the trigger, high-elevation ice is disappearing throughout—a pattern that can proceed as world warming accelerates the speed of change in mountain ecosystems, cryospheric programs, hydrological regimes, and biodiversity, according to the Mountain Analysis Initiative.
