The Rwenzori Mountains rise along the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, just miles from the equator. One of the few places on Earth where glaciers meet rainforest, the range is sacred to the Bakonzo people who have lived in its shadow for generations.
They call it Rwenzori, from the Bakonzo word for snow. But the ice that once defined these peaks is vanishing—and with it, an entire cosmology is being thrown off balance.
An expedition to map what remains of the tropical glacier was launched in 2024 by an international team led by the environmental nonprofitProject Pressure, in collaboration with UNESCO and the Uganda Wildlife Authority. Surveying the Rwenzori’s three major peaks—Stanley, Baker, and Speke—the team created the first 3D model of Mount Stanley’s ice field and installed long-term monitoring equipment. The results were stark: The glaciers on mounts Speke and Baker are gone. What remains on Stanley is melting fast, and is expected to disappear within this decade.
These efforts now form the most comprehensive archive of the Rwenzori’s fast-vanishing glaciers. According to UNESCO, a third of all World Heritage sites with glaciers—including Rwenzori— are expected to lose them entirely by 2050, no matter the pace of emissions reductions. Some scientists warn that Uganda’s glaciers could disappear even sooner.
Alfred Masereka knows these mountains intimately. A member of the Bakonzo community and a ranger with the Uganda Wildlife Authority, he grew up watching the glaciers shift before his eyes. “I was 10 years old when I first climbed the mountains,” he told Atmos. “It was a school trip.” But it wasn’t until 1996, at 16, that he completed the full central circuit and witnessed Stanley, Speke, and Baker still cloaked in gargantuan volumes of ice.
Almost 30 years on, he still remembers how snow would fall in place of rain. “Whenever it rained, I didn’t see real rain,” he said. “It was snowing. It was amazing.”
After training as a geography teacher, Masereka joined the Department of Ecological Monitoring and Research in Rwenzori Mountains National Park. His job was to track the changes in snow and ice not just as scientific data, but as a sacred presence. “That’s when I became truly interested in understanding what was happening to the mountains,” he said. “And I want to emphasize, the glaciers and snow started reducing at a very high rate around 2001. It has continued ever since.”
To the Bakonzo, the mountains are not just landforms—they are living beings. Ancestors move through the forests. Spirits flow with the rivers. And within the glaciers dwells Kithasamba, the mountain deity who governs fertility: of land, of people, and of time itself. His sacred gift is snow, which melts to nourish the valley below, sustaining crops and rivers.
“The name Rwenzori comes from a word meaning glaciers and snow,” said Masereka. “It’s where our traditional name comes from, and the name of our kingdom too. So when we lose the source of our name, the source of our dignity, and the source of our culture, it really pains us. We are losing our heritage.”
“The name Rwenzori comes from a word meaning glaciers and snow. So when we lose the source of our name, the source of our dignity, and the source of our culture, it really pains us. We are losing our heritage.”
Alfred Masereka
ranger, Uganda Wildlife Authority
In 150 AD, Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemy made a map of Africa inspired in part by reports from Arab traders that included the Rwenzori range—labeled “Mountains of the Moon” by Ptolemy—which the geographer correctly surmised to be a chief water source for the Nile River. The Rwenzori stretch roughly 75 miles across eastern equatorial Africa. Mount Stanley, their highest peak, rises to 16,762 feet and remains capped in snow despite the heat below. From its summit, glacial melt feeds rivers that eventually become the Nile.
The journey up the mountain is like trekking through geological eras. Dense rainforest gives way to bamboo groves, then giant lobelias, moss-draped trees, and the strange, otherworldly flora of the Afro-Alpine zone—ecosystems found nowhere else on Earth. Near the summits, the last fragments of equatorial ice quietly melt into memory.
The Bakonzo interpret the glaciers’ retreat in recent years as a sign of Kithasamba’s anger, provoked by deforestation, mining, and the desecration of sacred lands. The signs are hard to ignore: Human impact on the Rwenzori’s ecology stretches back decades. In the 1950s, foreign companies began mining copper on the lower slopes of the Rwenzori Mountains. Soil from the excavations was used to fill part of the Nyamwamba River valley. The river itself, fed by glacial melt high in the peaks, was redirected to make way for the mining town of Kilembe that eventually became one of Uganda’s largest urban centers. Over 15 million metric tons of mining waste were dumped into the valley, forming artificial hills and permanently altering the river’s natural flow.
Average temperatures in Uganda have risen since the 1960s by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit. In 2012, wildfires—linked to poaching and other illegal activity—swept through the mountains, burning for days and stripping the slopes of protective vegetation. Each disruption has chipped away at the delicate balance that once governed the mountain ecosystem.
As awareness around the glaciers’ role in sustaining local livelihoods grows among locals, there’s also a renewed focus on cultural beliefs—particularly those practices seen as vital to protecting both the mountain and its remaining ice. This spiritual and environmental reconnection persists across religious and generational divides. “Regardless of who claims the resources—whether religious or non-religious—there is a shared respect for the traditional practices,” said Masereka. “We still believe in them strongly, especially those of us who are closely connected to the mountain.”
But belief alone can’t stop the melt. Masereka is clear-eyed about the many forces accelerating glacial loss: modernization, the destruction of wetlands and riverbanks, the unraveling of ecosystems. But none are as devastating as the warming temperatures driven by climate change where those least responsible are paying the highest price.
Understanding the weight of that loss begins with knowing the mountains: their stories, their sacredness.
Western science only recently caught up to what Bakonzo cosmology innately understands: that water is memory, and loss leaves traces. Still, the urgency is growing. Klaus Thymann, founder of Project Pressure and lead on the 2024 expedition, has documented the glaciers for more than a decade. His work builds on historical photography from a 1906 Italian expedition, led by the Duke of the Abruzzi, that represents last major Western scientific mapping effort before Thymann’s.
Retracing those early routes, Thymann’s team photographed the glaciers from rarely seen angles, captured aerial drone footage, and created photogrammetry models to compare past and present landscapes. “The unfortunate thing about climate change is that it’s a planetary crash happening in slow motion,” said Thymann. “But when you understand what’s really going on, you panic. People are sleepwalking toward collapse.”
“God is becoming homeless. And if you’re even a little spiritually minded, you can understand what it means to feel that loss.”
Klaus Thymann
founder, Project Pressure
For the Bakonzo, collapse is not just environmental, it’s spiritual. “Western religion has worked hard to demoralize and erase traditional beliefs,” said Masereka. “People used to believe you shouldn’t bathe in rivers, dig near riverbanks, or destroy wetlands. These were sacred practices that protected the ecosystem. But Western religion calls them satanic. For those of us working in conservation, it’s a serious challenge, trying to protect the environment while also defending the traditional practices that sustain it.”
That loss is difficult to quantify. But it’s felt in the rhythm of rivers that no longer flood, in hills stripped of their cloud cover, in ancestral names that begin to fade from memory.
To outsiders, the Rwenzori glaciers may seem like a vanishing data point, one more marker of climate change. But for the Bakonzo, their disappearance is something else entirely: a severing of ties, a sacred rupture. “God is becoming homeless,” Thymann said. “And if you’re even a little spiritually minded, you can understand what it means to feel that loss.”
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