Free Republic

<p>MERERANI, Tanzania -- In the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, miners with flashlights tied to their heads crawl hundreds of feet beneath the East African plain, searching for a purple-brown crystal that will turn into a blue gem called tanzanite.</p> <p>Many of the rare stones chipped off by the spacemen, as the miners are called, find their way to display cases at Zales, QVC or Tiffany. But it's a long way from these dusty plains to U.S. jewelry stores, and the stones pass through many hands on their journey. Some of those hands, it is increasingly clear, belong to active supporters of Osama bin Laden.</p>

While human slavery is a fact of life in African nations like Mauritania and Sudan, Tanzania now is emerging as the latest center for the exploitation of child labor. Today, young children are forced to work in the country's mine, harvesting the valuable mineral resources of tanzanite, coltan and diamonds. Tanzanite, a semi-precious, purple-blue gemstone unique to Tanzania, was discovered for the first time 24 years ago by the Masai tribe. Its uniqueness and stunning beauty make it as sought-after and as valuable as diamonds. The resulting tanzanite mining rush lured thousands of Tanzanians and refugees from neighboring Congo, ...

African Ice Core Analysis Reveals Catastrophic Droughts, Shrinking Ice Fields, Civilization Shifts COLUMBUS, Ohio – A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began to form about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago. Lastly, the analysis also supports Ohio State University researchers' prediction that these unique bodies of ice will disappear in the next two decades, the victims of global warming. These findings were published today in the journal...

There is a new August 31, 2006 paper on the climate of Mount Kilimanjaro (Thanks to Timo Hämeranta and Koni Steffen for bringing this peer-reviewed contribution to my attention). The Geophysical Research Letters article is entitled “Kilimanjaro Glaciers: Recent areal extent from satellite data and new interpretation of observed 20th century retreat rates” (subscription required) and is authored by Nicolas J.Cullen, Thomas Mölg, Georg Kaser, Khalid Hussein, Konrad Steffen, and Douglas R. Hardy. The abstract of the paper reads, “Recent and long term variations in ice extent on Kilimanjaro are investigated in the context of 20th century climate change in...

There has been a landslide on Mt. Kilmanjaro. Two members of one tour group have been killed. One member of a second group was also killed. There have been other injuries.

Kilimanjaro, the storied mountain that rises nearly four miles above the shimmering plains of Tanzania, is beginning to resemble the spotted owl — at least in the way it has become a two-sided icon in an environmental debate. The owl first entered the spotlight 15 years ago, in fierce debate over clear-cutting of ancient Pacific forests. Millions of acres were placed off-limits to logging when the bird was listed as threatened under the federal endangered-species law. Soon afterward, effigies of it began showing up on the grilles of logging trucks. Kilimanjaro's majestic glacial cap of 11,000-year-old ice has long captured...