Spiny new chameleon species described from Bale Mountains of Ethiopia
by Liz Kimbrough on 6 April 2021
Researchers have described a new chameleon species from the Bale Mountains of south-central Ethiopia and say it’s likely that more will emerge.
Wolfgang Böhme’s Ethiopian chameleon is around 15 centimeters (6 inches) long and has a distinct crest of large spiny scales along its back and tail.
It lives in bushes and small trees, often at the edges of the forest in the Bale Mountains, a biodiversity hotspot that’s also home to the endemic Ethiopian wolf as well as lions, leopards and warthogs.
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Study Reveals Extent and Impact of Climate Change on Tropical Mountains
Written by AZoCleantechMar 15 2021
The tropics are known to drive atmospheric and ocean circulation in the world, and hence have a crucial role to play in interpreting both the past and upcoming climate change.
The up to 200-m long, 15-m wide, and 2-m deep sorted stone strips on the southern Sanetti Plateau (ca. 3,900 m a.s.l.) were probably formed during the last glacial period under much cooler conditions and can best be explained by a natural sorting of the stones in the course of the cyclic freezing and thawing of the ground. Image Credit: Heinz Veit.
Fig. 2 Hypsography of the eight African mountains that were most extensively glaciated during the Late Pleistocene.
Top row (excluding High Atlas) shows the hypsography of the three highest mountains in the Ethiopian Highlands and bottom row shows the hypsography of four East African mountains. Note that the total surface area of the Bale Mountains above 3000 m is more than twice as large as that of most of the other peaks.
The varying hypsography of the mountains has implications for present and past glaciations on the continent. Under present climatic conditions, the ELA is located far above the maximum elevation of most of the African mountains. Glaciers can therefore only persist in the summit areas of the three highest peaks of the East African Mountains. However, once the ELA decreases below 4000 to 4500 m as during the last glaciation (
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IMAGE: The up to 200 m long, 15 m wide and 2 m deep sorted stone strips on the southern Sanetti Plateau (ca. 3,900 m a.s.l.) were probably formed during the. view more
Credit: Heinz Veit
As the driver of global atmospheric and ocean circulation, the tropics play a central role in understanding past and future climate change. Both global climate simulations and worldwide ocean temperature reconstructions indicate that the cooling in the tropics during the last cold period, which began about 115,000 years ago, was much weaker than in the temperate zone and the polar regions. The extent to which this general statement also applies to the tropical high mountains of Eastern Africa and elsewhere is, however, doubted on the basis of palaeoclimatic, geological and ecological studies at high elevations.