The Mountain Deity Being Lost to Climate Change

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 nonprofit Project 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 the next few decades.

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.”