( The dwindling icecap atop Africas Mount...)Shrinking of Mt. Kilimanjaros Ice Cap Not Due to Global Warming: Study,Health

The dwindling icecap atop Africas Mount Kilimanjaro cannot be attributed to human induced global warming, an American and an Austrian researcher duo have said in a recent study .

"There are dozens, if not hundreds, of photos of midlatitude glaciers you could show where there is absolutely no question that they are declining in response to the warming atmosphere," said climatologist Philip Mote, a University of Washington research scientist.

Mote and Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, write in their study in the journal American Scientist, that the decline in Mt. Kilimanjaro's ice has been going on for more than a century and that most of it occurred before 1953.

Evidence of atmospheric warming there before 1970 is inconclusive. As such, using the mountain as a poster child for climate change is inaccurate, they say.

According to Mote, in the tropics particularly on Mt. Kilimanjaro processes very different from those that have diminished glacial ice in temperate regions closer to the poles are at work.

The ice decline is primarily due to complex interacting factors, including the vertical shape of the ice's edge, which allows it to shrink but not expand.

They also cite decreased snowfall, which reduces ice buildup and determines how much energy the ice absorbs because the whiteness of new snow reflects more sunlight, the lack of new snow allows the ice to absorb more of the sun's energy, for this shrinkage.

Unlike midlatitude glaciers, which are warmed and melted by surrounding air in the summer, the ice loss on Mt. Kilimanjaro is driven strictly by solar radiation. Since air near the mountain's ice almost always is well below freezing, there typically is no melting. Instead ice loss is mainly through a process called sublimation, which requires more than eight times as much energy as melting, the study says.

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