Jun Uetake (@JunUetake) of Colorado State University, has in the recent past sampled the glacier microbiology on Mt Kenya in order to compare it with the glacier microbiology in the Rwenzori. They found samples were in fact similar to microbial communities from glaciers in China and Svalbard, which is interesting in terms of global atmospheric transport of microbial communities.
Anyway while doing his research, he took hourly images of the glacier surface from near the terminus, between September 2015 and September 2016, which actually captured the splitting of the glacier into two, a process that began earlier in 2013/14. Jun sent me the time-lapse movie ages ago, but the camera angle changes party through and so just today I tried to align them best I could and make a comparison from 2015-09-21 to 2016-09-13:
Some of Juns papers on microbiology:
- Communities of algae and cyanobacteria on glaciers in west Greenland
- A snow algal community on Akkem glacier in the Russian Altai mountains
- Spatial distribution and abundance of red snow algae on the Harding Icefield, Alaska derived from a satellite image
- Biological ice-core analysis of Sofiyskiy glacier in the Russian Altai
- Spatial variations in impurities (cryoconite) on glaciers in northwest Greenland
- Biogeography of cryoconite forming cyanobacteria on polar and Asian glaciers
- Microbial community variation in cryoconite granules on Qaanaaq Glacier, NW Greenland
