SCENE CHANGES: The Unmaking of Place

ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The Snows of Kilimanjaro

And then instead of going on to Arusha they turned left, he evidently figured that they had the gas, and looking down he saw a pink sifting cloud, moving over the ground, and in the air, like the first snow in a blizzard, that comes from nowhere, and he knew that the locusts were coming up from the South. Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.

— Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
from The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories,
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927

 

The glaciers and ice fields atop Mt. Kilimanjaro. In the February 17, 1993 image (top) there is still a fair amount of ice, with the crater visible in the center. By February 11, 2017 (bottom), there are only fragments of ice scattered around a naked crater. The wisps of white are clouds.

From the Serengeti, the setting for Hemingway's story, Kilimanjaro looms alone and immense in the eastern sky. During much of the year the sun rises from directly behind it. Kilimanjaro is the world's largest and tallest free-standing mountain, and in that publication year of 1927 it would still have been crowned with most of its massive ice fields. To the dying narrator, imagining himself in the small plane soaring into the glittering place he had viewed only from a distance, it truly would have seemed "as wide as all the world." What better metaphor for the great maw of eternity?

Yet by 1927 the ice fields had already begun to shrink. First measured in 1912, they were early in a slow decline (approximately 1% per year) most likely brought on by the leveling of the region's forests for agriculture. Fewer trees would have meant less evaporation from foliage, resulting in less cloud cover to shield the ice from solar rays, and less precipitation to replenish it. Less precipitation also means the top layer of ice darkens with dirt and soot, and like any dark surface, absorbs more radiation, speeding up the melting.

More recently the shrinkage has accelerated to about 2½% per year, with climate change receiving much of the blame. Of the extent present in 1912, 85% is gone. Of what remained in 2000, 26% disappeared in only nine years.¹ The ice fields are nearly 12,000 years old and have previously withstood a 300-year drought; but today's climate conditions are likely to prove their undoing, together with other tropical glaciers such as those in the Andes and New Guinea.

The ice fields' meltwater has long fed the rivers of the surrounding area, watering the fields of the pastoral Maasai people and providing water for the villages. The ice-crowned volcano is a focal point of foreign tourism, a major industry in revenue-starved Tanzania. It is also the only source of historic climate data for Africa; the ice cores drilled from its thinning ice fields hold all the knowledge there is about past climate dynamics in the region, as well as clues for the future.

The loss of Kilimanjaro's glaciers and ice fields would also be an "aesthetic disaster," according to Stefan Hastenrath, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Hastenrath has climbed the mountain three times, and believes there is "hardly anything more beautiful."²

Estimates of how soon we will see a naked Kilimanjaro range from a few years to a few decades. But however soon it may happen, scientists agree that there is where we are going.