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.
February 25th, 2021 in Podcast. Closed
Bale Mountains Harenna Forest is one of the few places where people still harvest wild arabica beans to make coffee. The forest is also noted for being one of the few places where people still practice a traditional style of beekeeping that involves scaling trees to maintain hand-carved hives. (NASA Earth Observatory image)
NASA Earth Observatory
There are few places in Ethiopia or the world quite like the Harenna Forest. Spread across the southern slopes of the Bale Mountains, it is the second-largest stand of moist tropical forest in Ethiopia and the largest cloud forest in the country.