Africa’s glaciers have shrunk by more than 90% since the late 19th century. The continent has relatively few snow-capped peaks; Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya in East Africa and the Rwenzori Mountains on the Uganda-DRC border are the only glaciers.
Africa is warming faster than the global average, and a UN climate report said that Mount Kenya’s glaciers are disappearing particularly fast, losing more than half their area in the last decade. African glaciers are small, so do not act as water reservoirs like European or Himalayan ones, a climate scientist wrote in The Conversation, but they still hold vital information on long-term climate patterns, as ice layers laid down each year record of regional temperature and precipitation.