Kilimanjaro Ice Cliffs: morphology, recession, micro-climate, and how they determine glacier area loss
Abstract
We present a comprehensive study of the ice cliffs on Kilimanjaro including a morphological description, results from four high-resolution photogrammetrical surveys, a physical analysis of their recession and the micro-climatological drivers behind it, and how the ice cliffs determine glacier area loss on Africa's highest mountain. Since more than one century the near-vertical ice cliffs at the margins of the plateau glaciers on Kilimanjaro (5895m a.s.l., Tanzania, East Africa) have fascinated climbers and explorers but only since about one decade it is known that they determine glacier area loss. They tend to be either facing north or south and continuously recede at a rate of nearly one meter per year. This recession is irreversible because there is no accumulation possible at the cliff faces and ice deformation is very minor. A process-based surface mass balance model, forced by automatic weather station and eddy-covariance data and validated against high resolution photogrammetric surveys, showed that the recession is rather robust against climatic changes. Consequently, as long as the cliffs exist, glacier area on the summit plateau of Kilimanjaro will decrease, and this shrinkage cannot be directly linked to climatic changes! The only way to conserve the Kilimanjaro glaciers is to permanently build up new ice bodies from heavy snowfalls but the frequency of those events has decreased since about 1880. However, in order to decipher climate signals from glacier shrinkage on Kilimanjaro it is key to understand the physical processes at the ice cliffs.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011AGUFM.C13A0730W
- Keywords:
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- 0776 CRYOSPHERE / Glaciology