Crumbling crests
'It was beautiful': Mount Kenya's glaciers melting away
The United Nations has warned that glaciers worldwide are melting "faster than ever". It declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers' Preservation and March 21 the first World Day for Glaciers, highlighting their crucial role in freshwater supply, and urging conservation efforts.
Mount Kenya is one of the only mountains on the African continent with glaciers, and scientists fear that as soon as 2030 it could become one of the first to turn entirely ice-free in modern times.
The Lewis Glacier lost 90 percent of its volume between 1934 and 2010, according to a 2011 study led by Rainer Prinz of Austria's University of Innsbruck.
A satellite study last year, published in the journal "Environmental Research: Climate", found that the surface area of the ice on Mount Kenya was just 4.2 percent of the size compared with the first reliable observations in 1900.
