ABSTRACT
The tropical glaciers are amongst the least known in the world. All of them are believed to have retreated in the course of the twentieth century. Documentary evidence of the timing of their fluctuations in earlier centuries is sparse. There are very few historical records concerning the glaciers of Latin America, though it is conceivable that additional information is hidden away in Iberian, Vatican or other archives. For Africa and New Guinea no such hopes can be entertained (Figure 11.1); only the Lewis Glacier on Mount Kenya has been the subject of detailed and sustained monitoring in recent decades (Hastenrath 1989, Kaser 1995). New information from ice cores is summarized here and additional detail can be found in Chapter 16.
