Farewell to the snows of Kilimanjaro

The most surprising vision discovered by the hundreds of people who climb to the top of Kilimanjaro every year happens a few meters from Kibo Peak, its culminating point, at 5,895 meters above sea level.

To reach it, you have to walk a long way along the edge of the gigantic volcano.

It is near the end of the run, when the snows of Kilimanjaro are discovered.

Rather, its glaciers or, even better, the remains that remain of them.

A few tens of meters away from the crest, the upper front of the ice is an immaculate wall that in some points reaches 20 vertical meters in height.

Before 2000, that mass of ice covered the top of the mountain.

Today with each passing day its edge is lower.

During the ascent, over six days, snow and ice are conspicuous by their absence, despite the altitude through which the route goes.

They do not glimpse up to the top.

Only there, where the temperatures are lower and the winds colder, resist the last ice of the highest mountain in Africa.

In less than three decades, in 2050, not the slightest trace of them will remain.

This is what the data offered by UNESCO in its latest report,

, prepared in collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN.

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The report highlights an accelerated melting of glaciers present in 50 World Heritage sites.

A total of 18,600 ice rivers covering an area of ​​66,000 square kilometers, approximately 10% of the current total glacial area of ​​the planet.

Among them, due to their position under the equator,

.

Natural monuments will also be affected such as Everest, the highest mountain on the planet, the Alaskan glaciers and the Antarctic ice masses, under which the existence of large rivers of water in constant increase has just been confirmed, due to the increase in temperatures.

The report denounces that, since the year 2000 and due to CO2 emissions,

.

The amount is equivalent to the joint annual water expenditure of the populations of Spain and France.

Such a volume is responsible for the fact that the global rise in the level of the oceans has risen just under 5 percent since then.

Half of the world's population depends directly or indirectly on glaciers.

Providers of water for domestic use, agriculture and as a source of energy, they are a privileged scientific laboratory.

Sacred places for local communities, they have a prominent role in human culture and constitute a powerful attraction for millions of tourists around the world.

Around 50 percent of the planet's biodiversity is located in the areas of influence that irrigate the waters coming from the glaciers.

These ice masses play a very important role in global climate regulation.

Especially the ice of Antarctica and Greenland, regulators of the circulation of ocean waters.

Unesco considers glaciers one of the most accurate indicators of current climate change.

According to the report's data, the last African glaciers, located on Mounts

.

Symbols of global climate change, with them will go the last snow that resists in Africa.

They are followed on the list by the equatorial glaciers of South America, especially the Peruvian ones in the Huascarán National Park and those in Los Alerces National Park in Argentina.

The latter are experiencing a dramatic situation, with a reduction of more than 45 percent of the mass they had in 2000.

A large number of glaciers on the North American continent, such as those in Yosemite National Park, in the United States, and those in Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, in Canada, will have no better luck.

The European glaciers, led by those of the Pyrenees, followed by all the ice rivers of the Alps and the Dolomites, will vanish, always according to the aforementioned report.

The announced thaw will extend to the last corners of the Earth.

As in the Te Wahipounamu glaciers, in remote New Zealand, as well as those in Antarctica, where continuous detachments into the ocean of the largest glacial portions in history take place.

The Unesco report considers a third of all those glaciers almost definitively condemned, although it indicates that it is still possible to save the other two thirds.

As long as global temperatures do not exceed 1.5º Celsius, compared to those recorded before the pre-industrial period.

1.2 degrees more temperature

The challenge does not seem easy, if the registered figures are taken into account.

According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the past five years have been the hottest in two centuries.

Only since 2015, the global average of temperatures has increased 1.2ºC compared to those registered when the machines began to move the industry.

It is for all this that Unesco has described the conservation of glaciers as "a great challenge" for the Conference on Climate Change, COP27, held in Egypt.

In

one of the most celebrated works by Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway, the white expanse that covers the roof of Africa and gives its name to the writing does not appear until the last lines of the work, when Harry, the protagonist, sick with gravity, he flies over the mountain in the plane that takes him out of the sheet.

It is very possible that in three decades these snows will only last in the novel.

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