WASHINGTON - THE snows capping Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest peak, are shrinking rapidly and could vanish altogether in 20 years, most likely due to global warming, a US study published on Monday said.

The ice sheet that capped Kilimanjaro in 1912 was 85 per cent smaller by 2007, and since 2000 the existing ice sheet has shrunk by 26 per cent, the paleoclimatologists said.

The findings point to the rise in global temperatures as the most likely cause of the ice loss. Changes in cloudiness and precipitation may have also played a smaller, less important role, especially in recent decades, they added.

'This is the first time researchers have calculated the volume of ice lost from the mountain's ice fields,' said study co-author Lonnie Thompson, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University,

While the yearly loss of the mountain glaciers is most apparent from the retreat of their margins, Thompson said an equally troubling effect is the thinning of the ice fields from the surface. The summits of both the Northern and Southern Ice Fields atop Kilimanjaro have thinned by 1.9m and 5.1m respectively.

The scientists said they found no evidence of sustained melting anywhere else in the ice core samples they extracted, which date back 11,700 years. -- AFP