The mountains of Papua are not far from the equator, but they've been topped with "eternal snow" for centuries. The peaks in this Indonesian region on the world's second-largest island, just north of Australia, have offered scientists countless insights into the Earth's climate history. They're also the epicentre of the spiritual universe for many Papuans - a Mecca or a Vatican, as one activist puts it.
A century ago, the 300km (190-mile) stretch of the Sudirman Range had snow and permanent ice on all four of its major peaks. But now there are only small areas around Puncak Jaya, also known as Carstensz Pyramid, with any snow at all. These are expected to entirely disappear in a year or two.
Glacier cover around the peak has shrunk from nearly 1,900 hectares (4,700 acres) in the 19th Century to about 16 hectares (40 acres) today. Almost entire glaciers have vanished within a human lifetime. "There is a profound unfairness in this," says Marie Šabacká, a Czech glacier ecologist who travelled to Puncak Jaya last March in a bid to be among the last scientists to study Papua's "eternal snow".
She says the tropical glaciers in Papua are unique because they are separated from other glacier systems by thousands of kilometres. Papua is home to the "last remaining tropical ice" between the Andes and Himalayas. Ice cores taken from the slopes of Puncak Jaya preserve a record of climate history.
Scientists can use them to obtain information about atmospheric conditions in the region and understand changes in the planet's warmest ocean waters that surround the island - the tropical Pacific and Western Pacific Warm pool. But this archive is disappearing before scientists have had time to fully study it. The retreat of Papua's glaciers is driven by the same forces affecting ice around the world, Šabacká notes, a warming atmosphere caused by human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.
As temperatures rise, the freezing point moves higher up mountains, so more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow, even in places that once saw regular snowfall. El Niño events can accelerate this process, while local factors such as cloud cover, snowfall and mountain topography influence its pace. The mountains in Papua are just 450km (280 miles) south of the equator, where "permanent ice can survive only at very high altitudes and within a narrow range of climatic conditions", Šabacká says.
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