At least two things are critical to life in Tanzania: tourism and well-balanced weather. And both are threatened today by changing climate patterns, said University of Louisville professor Keith Mountain after returning from an expedition to Africa with a group of St. Xavier High School students.

The group of 26 students, teachers and parents explored Tanzania’s landscape, met a few of its people and hiked to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Along the way, Mountain taught them about climate change and its effect on people.

Mt. Kilimanjaro “is an icon of Africa, Kenya and Tanzania,” said Mountain, who is chair of U of L’s department of geography and geosciences. “Thousands and thousands have seen the ice (on the mountain). It’s written into the fabric of literature” in Ernest Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro and into “people’s experience.”

Mountain, who travels each year to brutally cold and remote places to study ice, said his research and that of others has shown a rapid acceleration of melting on Mt. Kilimanjaro’s glaciers.

“From aerial surveys on the glacier, we are seeing a constant rate of reduction in the glacier,” he said. “By 2017 or certainly by 2020, if there is any ice at all, it will just be vestigial ice.”

“There are really big issues attached to this,” Mountain noted. “This is a country that lives on the fringe. Precipitation is unpredictable. Any shift in the climate has an important impact on the country.”

And in Tanzania a major part of the economy is tourism — thousands travel there each year to see wildlife on the Serengeti and glaciers on the mountain.

“Will (the mountain) hold a tourist attraction when the glaciers melt?” Mountain said he wonders. He’s also concerned about the sociologic impact. “How will it be for people who already live with limited water supplies and limited growing seasons?”

During the expedition, the St. X group visited a Maasai village. And Matt Morris, a St. X student, conducted a video interview with a Maasai chief.

Morris asked the chief what about climate change worried him.

The chief told him “he was worried about the droughts — that the animals would move,” said Morris. He was also worried about “finding a water-source nearby” and that “disease might pick up.”

While global warming is the most commonly discussed aspect of climate change, a rise in temperature is only part of the picture, said Mountain. In fact, the disappearance of glaciers on Mt. Kilimanjaro is more about weather patterns.

“It’s, on average, minus five degrees up there,” Mountain said. “It’s a precipitation issue — a change in the moisture pattern on the mountain.”

Simply put, the precipitation that used to feed the glaciers came off the Indian Ocean. But the changing climate has altered weather patterns. As the glaciers melt and provide water for those below, no new moisture makes it up the mountain to replenish the store.

Ben Dant, who will be a senior at St. X this fall, said that on the group’s way up the mountain, he saw a stake in the ground that marked where the ice once was.

Mountain told the group he placed stakes around the perimeter of the ice in 1999 and 2000. “It has receded significantly,” he said.

Mountain and his team took four ice core samples from the summit in 2000 and set up a monitoring station there. One mass of ice in 2000 “measured 20 to 30 meters and has deteriorated significantly and is dividing into chunks,” he said.

“Under current climate conditions, there is no indication to expect it to stop,” he said. “Kilimanjaro has the last glaciers in Africa. There are other pockets of ice, but the glaciers started disappearing in the last 30 years.”

During one of the early days of St. X’s expedition, the students saw a woman carrying water five miles outside of the closest town. Mountain explained that people are forced to go farther and farther to find the resources they need.

“Eighty percent of these people’s day is (spent) meeting their obligation to stay alive,” he said. “The poor and marginalized countries — where climate dictates the quality of their lives — are the one that will feel it.”

Mountain said he thinks the St. X students had a good chance to observe the situation on the expedition.

“The effects will be felt when they sit down to contemplate what they have seen,” he said. “Moving from Louisville into a third-world country is an eye-opener. It’s not (about) going into a community, looking and walking away. It’s about looking at the deeper issues that come into this. That’s the sort of thing I’d like to think people are coming home with.”

While climate change continues to be studied and its causes are debated, Mountain said there’s no doubt “the rate of change we’re seeing is more rapid than we’ve seen in 10,000 years. It’s been warmer, and it’s been colder. But the rate of change” has not been seen. And “there is a human signature that is helping this rate of change occur,” he said.