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Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Op-Ed Contributor: The Tarps of Kilimanjaro
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 20:05:44 -0500 (EST)
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Op-Ed Contributor: The Tarps of Kilimanjaro
November 17, 2003
By OLIVER MORTON
LONDON - The green-gold expanse of savanna; above it, the
purple horizon-hiding haze; and above that, like a pyramid
improbably suspended in the sky, the snows of Kilimanjaro.
"Great, high and unbelievably white in the sun," as
Hemingway wrote, the continent of Africa - some would say
our planet itself - has hardly anything to show more fair.
But the show could soon be over. The summit of Kilimanjaro
is losing its ice so quickly that it could be barren dirt
before the next decade is out. When the ice goes, it will
take with it an irreplaceable 10-millennium record of the
African climate, a profitable tourist attraction and a
source of beauty that is a joy to contemplate.
At first sight, the loss of Kilimanjaro's ice doesn't look
like the sort of thing anyone could do much to stop. The
mountain's year-round ice is mostly to be found in a
handful of fields around the volcano's central crater.
Though snow comes and goes from the mountain's flanks with
the seasons, these summit ice fields have been shrinking
for more than a century; from 1912 to 2000 four-fifths of
their area vanished.
It is not clear that global warming is responsible for this
precipitous retreat (retreating glaciers elsewhere, like
those in the Alps, offer much more convincing smoking
guns). But that does not clear humans of blame.
After all, it is reasonably suspicious that, after
persisting for more than a hundred centuries, the ice began
to vanish in the very century in which humans started to
change the environment both globally and, perhaps more
important, locally. It may well be that a regional change
of some sort - deforestation, in all likelihood - has dried
out the moist, rising winds that used to replenish the ice.
The question of what is destroying the ice, though, is less
pressing than the question of whether anything can be done
to save it. And the surprising answer to the second
question is yes. You see, the two main ice fields on top of
Kilimanjaro are big flat slabs with cliff-like faces.
According to scientists studying the mountain, it is
melting from these cliffs - rather than from the flat tops
of the fields - that seems to be the key to the problem.
Reading about this, Euan Nisbet, a Zimbabwean greenhouse
gas specialist at The Royal Holloway College, University of
London, was struck by a fairly simple solution: drape the
cliffs in white polypropylene fabric. Sunlight bounces off,
and the ice below stays cool. The result would look like a
giant washing line: God's crisp, white sheets aired out
three miles up in the sky.
Mr. Nisbet, whose family tree is thick with foresters,
stresses that he doesn't see this as a permanent solution -
but it would buy some decades, even a century, during which
ways could be found to develop reforestation plans good for
the mountain and the people who live beneath it.
The task of protecting the ice, while monumental, would not
be impossible; the relatively small size of the ice fields
is, after all, the whole point. In principle it would be
well within the grasp of the world's grandmaster wrapper,
Christo. "Running Fence," the Christo masterpiece that
snaked through 25 miles of Sonoma and Marin Counties in
California for a couple of weeks in 1976, would be easily
long enough to girdle the two main ice fields.
Given that the cliffs are 60 to 150 feet high, their
covering would have to be taller than "Running Fence"; but
the total amount of fabric required would probably be no
greater than that used for the bright pink skirts Christo
spread out around the islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay in
1983.
Indeed, Christo and his wife and partner, Jeanne-Claude,
would make good consultants for the project; the team that
convinced German parliamentarians to let them wrap the
Reichstag might well persuade the Tanzanian government to
allow the same thing to be done to the country's best-known
feature.
Getting hundreds of thousands of square yards of fabric to
the mountain top would be fairly easy - pack it up tightly
and throw it out the back of a transport plane. Hanging it
off the ice cliffs would be tricky, and require a lot of
help. But it is hard to imagine that, if the money for such
a project were to be found, the volunteers would not come
running from around the world. And once the hanging is
done, the main job would be over.
The rest of the preservation effort might just consist of a
few snow machines to keep the top surface fresh and white
in the months when no snow falls. The fresher the ice the
more sunlight it reflects; the less light absorbed, the
less the ice will melt.
The effort to preserve a square mile of ice in the
equatorial sky could become a powerful local and universal
symbol. Cloaking the ice cliffs of Kilimanjaro would not
just borrow the techniques of an art installation - it
would be a work of art in itself. Done properly, it would
be a preservation of beauty that is itself, beautiful.
What's more, preserving the ice would be a way of saying
that we do not have to accept environmental change, even
when it looks inevitable. The white tarps would float above
the clouds a tentative hope: the hope that human will and
ingenuity just might be able to meet the challenges of a
century in which more change will be faced, and more
protection needed, than at any other time in human history
- or Kilimanjaro's.
Oliver Morton is author of "Mapping Mars: Science,
Imagination and the Birth of a World."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/17/opinion/17MORT.html?ex=1070117544&ei=1&en=6bb8c8e1b0856a00
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