大象传媒

Glaciers across the globe, including the last ones in Africa, will be unavoidably lost by 2050 due to climate change, the UN says in a report.

Researchers used existing satellite data to track the shrinking of nearly 19,000 glaciers. They concluded that even if global temperature increases were kept below 1.5 degrees, glaciers at sites like Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Yosemite in the US will disappear in three decades.

Professor Douglas Hardy is from University of Massachusetts Amherst and has been researching Kilimanjaro's glaciers for more than 20 years. He told Newsday: 鈥淲hen I started in 2000, there were three main glaciers and six to eight smaller ones. Today, only the Northern Ice Field is an intact glacier with maybe ten fragments of glaciers elsewhere and all but the one will likely be gone in five to ten years.鈥�

(Picture: Glacier on Mount Kilimanjaro. Credit: Getty Images.)