If current conditions continue, experts say the glaciers that line the uppermost reaches of Mt Kilimanjaro will be gone in just 20 years, reports Azadeh Ansari for CNN.

“In a very real sense, these glaciers are being decapitated from the surface down,” reports Lonnie Thompson, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University. Thompson is co-author of a study on Kilimanjaro published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Previous studies of Kilimanjaro’s glaciers have relied on aerial photographs to measure the rate of the retreating ice. For this survey, scientists climbed Kilimanjaro and drilled into the glaciers to measure the volume of the ice fields atop the 19,331-foot peak. Kilimanjaro’s ice cover shrank by 1 percent a year from 1912 to 1953, then jumped to 2.5 percent a year from 1989 to 2007. Since 2000, Kilimanjaro’s three remaining ice fields shrunk by 26 percent, scientists found.

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