Rwenzori Glaciers.

Are you planning to visit the Rwenzori mountains and all you wish to know about this mountain are the glaciers  found there. Well, the Rwenzori glaciers’ transformations were shocking, but hardly unexpected, given the severity of the global catastrophe. The Rwenzori mountain tops, however, were marked by the persistence of glacial ice.

It is pitch black and icy outside when dawn breaks. Nearly three feet of snow have trapped a hefty tripod. A frigid wind whips across the Rwenzori Mountains, cutting into his flimsy jacket. However, Vittorio Sella remains unfazed. He does this for a living. He steadies the tripod with a large camera he built himself and starts to pan slowly across the  Rwenzoris’ snow-capped summits. After meticulously framing the shot, Sella places the film plate on camera and waits for dawn to break over the mountains. In due time, as the dawn light begins to paint the scene, Sella delicately clicks the shutter button to record a breathtaking panorama of one of the world’s most picturesque mountain ranges.

In 1906, Sella was the one who initially documented this Rwenzori scenery. He meticulously recorded the flora and fauna of the Rwenzori. Reflecting on his work, it is intriguing and disheartening to observe the significant retreat of the Rwenzori glaciers since these images were captured more than a century ago.

“By 2030, it is predicted  that there won’t  be any ice left on the mountain, and   really  you are looking at a last chance to see them,” predicts Richard Taylor, a geology professor at University College London. The total area of the glaciers has decreased from around 2.7 square miles at the turn of the twentieth century to about 0.2 square miles today. The glaciers melt at a rate of approximately 0.2 square miles every decade, according to Taylor’s calculations.

In 2012, Klaus Thymann spearheaded a mission to the Rwenzori Mountains to get additional footage of the glacier’s retreat, motivated by photographs taken by Vittorio Sella. The shifts were shocking, however, and the intensifying climate catastrophe made them predictable. The Rwenzori mountain tops, however, were marked by the persistence of glacial ice.

But eight years later, on the same journey, Thymann took more pictures of the Rwenzori Mountains. At this point, glaciers were still very rare.

The once-cloud-covered top of Mount Speke now stands starkly naked and black against the backdrop of the sky. Vittorio Sella’s photographs of the West Stanley Glacier showed a silvery, smooth flow down the mountainside; however, the glacier had melted into the granite, exposing rough, jagged stone that explorers had never seen before. Mount Stanley’s glacial ice melted 60 meters vertically between 2012 and 2020, transforming the scene into something far different from the sepia-toned one that Sella photographed in the early 1900s.

Even if he could see them, would Sella still identify the Rwenzoris in these photos? Since the majority of the ice has melted, the mountains have become darker lines on the horizon, and the glaciers are no longer visible, he may need some time to complete the task.

At this time, the answer is not good. This, according to Richard Taylor, is your final opportunity to view them. The photos captured by Sella and Thymann will serve as “the evidence of what was there, the proof,” and in the future, the ice will serve as a “fairy tale.”