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Science 18 October 2002:
Vol. 298. no. 5593, pp. 589 - 593
DOI: 10.1126/science.1073198
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Reports

Kilimanjaro Ice Core Records: Evidence of Holocene Climate Change in Tropical Africa

Lonnie G. Thompson,12* Ellen Mosley-Thompson,13 Mary E. Davis,12 Keith A. Henderson,12 Henry H. Brecher,1 Victor S. Zagorodnov,12 Tracy A. Mashiotta,1 Ping-Nan Lin,1 Vladimir N. Mikhalenko,4 Douglas R. Hardy,5 Jürg Beer6

Six ice cores from Kilimanjaro provide an ~11.7-thousand-year record of Holocene climate and environmental variability for eastern equatorial Africa, including three periods of abrupt climate change: ~8.3, ~5.2, and ~4 thousand years ago (ka). The latter is coincident with the "First Dark Age," the period of the greatest historically recorded drought in tropical Africa. Variable deposition of F- and Na+ during the African Humid Period suggests rapidly fluctuating lake levels between ~11.7 and 4 ka. Over the 20th century, the areal extent of Kilimanjaro's ice fields has decreased ~80%, and if current climatological conditions persist, the remaining ice fields are likely to disappear between 2015 and 2020.

1 Byrd Polar Research Center,
2 Department of Geological Sciences,
3 Department of Geography, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
4 Institute of Geography, Moscow, Russia.
5 Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003-9297, USA.
6 Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (EAWAG) Duebendorf, Switzerland.
*   To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: thompson.3{at}osu.edu

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