UMass Magazine Online

Winter 2005

Departments

Prerequisite

Features

A Fruitful Partnership

A New Kind of Farm a New Breed of Farmer

Dear One Absent This Long While

Prerequisite

Where the Antelope Roamed

–Fred Contrada




	This antelope carcass discovered on the slopes of Kilimanjaro may hold clues about the warming of the earth’s atmosphere.

IN "THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO," Ernest Hemingway’s characters discuss reports of a leopard carcass found frozen on the mountain’s summit and speculate as to how it got there. Maybe it was chasing an antelope.

UMass Amherst climatologist Doug Hardy came upon an unexpected supplement to his research on climate change when he discovered the corpse of an antelope near the weather station he has set up on Kilimanjaro’s summit glacier. It had apparently been exposed recently by the melting of the ice.

Hardy was on his fifth trip to the mountain in September to make improvements to the weather station, which is gathering data as part of his research into why Kilimanjaro’s glaciers are vanishing at such an alarming rate (“The Vanishing Snows of Kilimanjaro,” UMass Amherst, Spring 2004).

Hardy has identified the animal as a klipspringer, a small antelope that favors steep terrain. What it was doing at 19,000 feet, however, remains a mystery. He took samples from the carcass and is having them dated in the hope that he can learn how long ago the klipspringer died. Its time under the ice could provide another clue to the speed at which the snows of Kilimanjaro are disappearing.

[top of page]

Supergalactic X-Ray Vision

Supergalactic: larger image

Synchronicity

Synchronicity: more images

A Spot for Tea

A Spot for Tea: more images

Art Under Glass

Art Under Glass: larger image

Black is back

Black is back: larger image

Movin' and Groovin' at the Eric Carle Museum