Word: kilimanjaro
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...long ago, Ohio State University glaciologist Lonnie Thompson was standing on the summit of East Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro, watching his drilling team bring up a cylindrical core of ice. With eyes honed by a quarter-century of experience, he saw immediately that the core's glassy surface was riddled with holes--not the little round holes formed by trapped air bubbles but gaping conduits that could have been excavated only by running water. It was not an encouraging sign...
Indeed, the holes confirmed what Thompson already strongly suspected--that the snow-clad ice fields of Kilimanjaro, immortalized by Ernest Hemingway as "great, high and unbelievably white," are undergoing such rapid warming that they are likely to vanish altogether in another 15 years. And if that happens, Thompson realized, then all that will remain of Kilimanjaro's crowning white glory will be whatever fragments he and his colleagues managed to bring back to Ohio State and stash in their Arctic-cold freezer...
...that much, at least, Thompson and his team succeeded. The ice from Kilimanjaro is now back in Columbus, Ohio, along with numerous other specimens wrested from earlier expeditions to the impressively high mountains that ring the tropics. During the next five years, Thompson plans to retrieve still more. If it weren't for his work, the world might forfeit a natural library filled with priceless archives. For like the rings of long-lived trees and the accreted layers of massive corals, ice encodes surprisingly precise records of swings in temperature and precipitation over the centuries. Once that ice starts...
...that "while some girls dream of a big house with a white picket fence, my dream is to lead a life that is extraordinary, never ordinary." Shortly after uttering those words, she found herself climbing past howling monkeys in Africa to reach a 12,000-ft. plateau on Mount Kilimanjaro, where she and Erik wed in the summer...
...Despite being an accomplished mountaineer?summiting Denali, Kilimanjaro in Africa and Aconcagua in Argentina, among other peaks, and, in the words of his friends, "running up 14ers" (14,000-ft. peaks)?Erik viewed Everest as insurmountable until he ran into Scaturro at a sportswear trade show in Salt Lake City, Utah. Scaturro, who had already summited Everest, had heard of the blind climber, and when they met the two struck an easy rapport. A geophysicist who often put together energy-company expeditions to remote areas in search of petroleum, Scaturro began wondering if he could put together a team that...