Word: ice
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...Jacques Plante was seen as a wimp. After the Montreal Canadiens goalie was struck in the face by a flying puck while playing against the New York Rangers on Nov. 1, 1959, the future Hall-of-Famer refused to return to the ice sans protection. Much to the scorn of his coach and fans, Plante returned from the locker room with a crude home-made fiberglass mask in place. Though coach Toe Blake wanted Plante to remove the mask after his wounded face healed, the Canadiens rattled off an 18-game win streak, despite Plante's obscured face. The complaints...
...likelier explanation, he and others say, is a combination of factors, including changes in weather patterns. Fewer clouds and more sunlight would create a layer of warm air right at the glaciers' surface, which would cause some melting. But most of the ice loss, he suggests, is due to sublimation - that is, ice turning directly into water vapor with no intermediate step. That tends to happen when temperatures are cold and the air is extremely dry, which is the case at Kilimanjaro's higher-than-19,000-ft. summit (it's the same reason ice cubes slowly wilt away...
...glaciologist at Ohio State University who has been to the summit of Africa's tallest mountain repeatedly over more than a decade, says that while the glaciers did start melting a century ago, their retreat has sped up dramatically in recent years. "We've lost 26% of the ice since 2000 alone. And that, unfortunately, is just what we predicted would happen." Within a few decades, he says, most if not all of Kilimanjaro's glaciers will be gone. (Read "Gore in the Senate: A More Receptive Audience...
...That's not to say that Thompson's research is the final word on the debate. Indeed, glacier experts have been waging an intellectual war for years over what's really causing the ice loss atop Kilimanjaro. The simplest explanation would be that warming temperatures are making the ice melt - and indeed, Thompson believes this is a big part of what's going...
...they're sitting in the mid-troposphere sublimating away is false. There are lakes on the surface of the glaciers," he says, noting that summit temperatures aren't so cold as to preclude the existence of water, "and when you drill down, the ice is saturated with water...