Finding the Source of the Nile River

a ride in the faluca up the nile is a ride up the corridor of history [Music] the nile river has served as a vital water supply for over 5 000 years from the earliest days of human civilization all the way up to modern times people have relied on its regular flooding to supply fertility to what would otherwise be a barren desert landscape the valley of the nile bespeaks the dawn of recorded time built indeed for the ages some of the most ancient relics in the world [Music] naturally with so much depending on this waterway for so long efforts to uncover the river's source date back to almost equally as far though the mystery of where exactly the nile begins prevails to this very day but for a time this wasn't the case or at least people didn't think it was you see sometime in the 2nd century a.d the greek egyptian geographer ptolemy who was kind of like the atlas pro of his time i guess you could say heard a story from an indian ocean merchant named diogenes the merchant told ptolemy how his boat had been blown off course by a storm bringing him to the east coast of africa from here he supposedly traveled inland for 25 days at which point he came across the source of the nile river a group of massive mountains feeding into a series of lakes which eventually flowed into the nile when asked for the name of these great mountains diogenes said the local people called them the mountains of the moon after the white of their snow capped peaks whether or not any of this actually happened is well unknowable but no matter what you believe ptolemy bought into this merchant's story big time excited to put an end to this already 3 000 year old mystery and immediately began including the mountains of the moon as well as the collection of lakes they supposedly fed on his maps then as ptolemy's works spread into both europe and the arab world the mountains of the moon passed from hearsay into scientific fact for the next nearly 2 000 years the practice of including this range on maps persisted until the 1800s or less than 200 years ago though we can see that over time with each new telling of the legendary mountains their stature grew and grew until maps like this one produced in 1805 showed the range spanning the entire length of africa 20 years later in 1827 this map was produced again showing the huge almost comically shaped mountain range dividing the continent standing as a testimony to just how little europeans actually knew about the interior of africa by this time the only problem with this is that if we look at an actual elevation map of africa produced in modern times will find surprise surprise there is no great long mountain range crossing the entire land mass and in reality africa is actually home to very few mountain ranges at all but the story of how we went from this to this is a fascinating one and takes us straight through the golden age of african exploration which by the end may very well lead us back to the source of the nile and even give us a glimpse into the future of africa now i should probably start off by saying that as the place where we first evolved africa has been inhabited by humans longer than anywhere else as such it's hard to say anything here was actually discovered given that indigenous people have always been found here and have known about the many spectacular sites of the continent for thousands of years the only problem is these people rarely ever took scientific records of what they saw and so despite being the literal cradle of mankind much of the oldest scientific data we have on the continent comes from these later expeditions led by europeans now you might have noticed the last few maps to ever show the mountains of the moon came from the early 1800s and there's a reason for this while by this point in history europeans were familiar enough with africa's coastline having fairly accurately mapped it on their way from europe to asia for trade the interior of africa was left almost entirely unexplored after all africa was and is an incredibly difficult place to traverse starting with the largest desert in the known world then transitioning into the overgrown jungles of the congo populated with animals bigger and fiercer than anywhere else and infested with mosquitoes carrying all sorts of horrific tropical diseases like malaria altogether these dangers and especially the prevalence of malaria earned africa the nickname the white man's grave as most europeans simply could not survive the conditions harbored within but while two things happened in the 1800s that would change all of this first in 1820 two french chemists isolated extract from the bark of a cinchona tree originally native to peru while this tree's bark had long been used by the indigenous quechua for a multitude of medicinal purposes extraction of the chemical quinine from this plant produced the first ever truly effective treatment for malaria and before long it was being packaged and sold in bulk across europe and america if this doesn't sound like a big deal then let me put it like this nearly overnight the biggest obstacle preventing europeans from venturing deeper into africa was removed less than a century ago european explorers in their quest for the source of the nile first penetrated into east africa until then the world outside had heard only scattered tales of africa's scenic wonders its fearsome wildlife and its bizarre peoples as a result a continent that for most of human history had been off limits to europeans suddenly wasn't and almost immediately a new wave of european-led expeditions flooded the african interior in the wake of the early explorers a great wave of european missionaries and colonizers who brought the outside world to east africa began to report in detail on the dark continent however as more and more educated adventurers made their way through the land it very quickly became apparent that the mountains of the moon did not actually exist or at least not in the form maps of the time would have led you to believe but erasing the mountains of the moon off the map only re-opened a nearly 5 000 year old can of worms if these mountains aren't here to feed the nile then where is the river's actual source by this time educated europeans went so far as to dismiss the entire notion that snow-capped mountains like those described to ptolemy could even exist in the sweltering climate of tropical africa and instead the source of the nile started to be pictured simply as a spring bubbling up from the ground but public opinion changed again after 1848 when two german missionaries turned explorers johannes redman and johann kraft came across the first piece of proof that given the mountains are high enough glacial ice can in fact survive even equatorial heat what they found was a massive singular mountain a dormant volcano with a peak undeniably topped by a number of shining white glaciers this lone mountain would later come to be known as mount kilimanjaro africa's tallest peak and served as tantalizing evidence of what more might be found if only they ventured even deeper after all while what they discovered was definitely impressive mount kilimanjaro's solitary nature is clearly not the group of mountains first described to ptolemy and its waters all flow south away from the nile rather than toward it what this meant for these two exploring germans is that they'd have to keep searching a full year later these same two missionaries pushed deeper northward where they eventually found mount kenya africa's second tallest mountain and another example of a solitary dormant volcano topped by substantial deposits of ice again however the waters from this mountain also flowed in the opposite direction of the nile exposing neither of these two volcanoes to be the mythical mountains of the moon but what these discoveries did show the world is that glacial ice could exist even here in the african tropics proving at the very least that more mountains could be found somewhere else that did in fact feed the nile and this was enough to bring even more explorers into the search arguably the most famous of these expeditions would have to be the one led by this man dr david livingston setting out from zanzibar in 1866 by this time the source of the nile had been narrowed down to somewhere between lake victoria and lake albert which themselves had only been discovered by europeans less than 10 years prior what livingston found however was that there were many more lakes here yet to be described by western literature and he became the first european to properly identify and describe water bodies like lake malawi lake banguelu and lake ngami presenting him with the arduous task of figuring out where the water of every one of africa's great lakes comes from and where they drain into this would lead livingston on essentially a wild goose chase across much of eastern africa that lasted for years during which time he also came down with a number of diseases and infections like pneumonia cholera ulcers and probably a lot more forcing him to lose contact with the rest of the world rumors and myths about the missing dr livingston of course only brought even more explorers to africa hoping to either discover his fate and or the source of the nile itself most notably the american journalist explorer henry morton stanley contracted by the new york herald to at least try to find livingston and spoiler alert amazingly he did departing in march of 1871 after livingston had already been lost in the african interior for five years stanley would eventually find the village of ujiji on the northern shores of lake tanganyika by november of the same year here livingston had been recovering from his many ailments and apparently had gotten quite comfortable to the point where he actually refused to leave with stanley hoping to eventually continue his work only two years later however he'd finally succumbed to dysentery and died with denial's source still a mystery okay so by this point still very little progress had actually been made in the way of discovering the source of the nile or in getting to the bottom of the mysterious mountains of the moon but for the second time things were about to change for the continent while the discovery of quinine may have been the first step in allowing europeans to penetrate deeper into africa expeditions such as those conducted by livingston and stanley were exceedingly or even prohibitively costly both in terms of money and human life meaning few people ever got the funding to actually embark on such an excursion but this all changed in 1884 when a collection of european powers came together to agree on how to divide up africa amongst themselves to colonize an event known as the berlin conference this meeting would kickstart the scramble for africa and suddenly exploration became less of a scientific pursuit and more of a business venture i mean think about it before you can claim a land colonize it and extract its resources you need to know what's actually there you need to know the landscape where the people or labor are and where there's a profit to be made for this reason the first step in the effort to colonize africa was to send geographers cartographers naturalists botanists geologists surveyors prospectors or what altogether we could call explorers to gather useful and detailed information about how and where to establish colonies sorry guys my voice is starting to go i don't know about the rest of this let's see and i'll be honest this is a pretty tough idea to swallow especially for somebody like me i've wanted to be an explorer for as long as i can remember and i used to look up to these sorts of people i was completely unaware until now that most of them weren't motivated by furthering the scope of human knowledge but rather were being paid to lay the groundwork for centuries of exploitation and oppression now to be fair david livingston came from before this time and actually had a very good reason to be in africa in his own words the nail sources are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men it is this power with which i hope to remedy an immense evil the evil in question was the east african slave trade or as livingston put it if my disclosures regarding the terrible eugenian slavery should lead to the suppression of the east coast slave trade i should regard that as a greater matter by far than the discovery of all the nail sources together or basically livingston was only trying to find the source of the nile so that he'd become a world famous explorer and people would finally listen to him about the horrors of the african slave trade which is i'll say it admirable but well as i've already told things didn't really go as planned being the one that actually found livingston it was stanley who became an instant worldwide celebrity the quote unquote greatest explorer of the time unfortunately stanley did not share the same convictions as livingston and eventually would come to embody the malevolent role later explorers played in the colonization of africa for his tremendous search and rescue stanley gained the attention of none other than king leopold ii of belgium you see belgium missed out on the first round of european colonialism having failed to establish any stake in the americas they watched with envy as their neighbors brought the riches of the new world back to europe with them but now that africa was up for grabs king leopold sought to remedy this mistake by claiming as much as he possibly could for belgium and by extension for himself of course being the king of an entire european country leopold knew absolutely nothing about africa and so instead of entering the brush himself he contracted stanley to cut out a state in the congo for him it was the task of stanley to chart the area construct roads and outposts along the congo river and make treaties with local chieftains that altogether laid the groundwork of what would become the congo free state arguably the cruelest and downright most genocidal colonization attempt made on the continent all under the guise of exploration while this is definitely enough to make stanley an infamous figure by today's standards during his own time these travels made him not only famous but also essentially the most knowledgeable european there was on the interior of africa it was this world renowned as the only man who could reliably cross the continent that earned stanley a desperate message from the british in 1886. their newly established colonial province of equatoria in what's now south sudan was in revolt led by people known as the mahadists and they needed someone to come rescue the governor emman pascha and restore order you know typical explorer things in exchange for letting him help the british as the leader of the so-called imminent pasha relief expedition stanley promised king leopold that he'd follow a longer route one that had never been taken before through the congo to explore more of it for him and maybe even annex more land under the belgian ruler after successfully navigating up the congo river and pushing through the itauri rainforest stanley found himself somewhere between lake albert and lake edward an area that at this time had yet to be mapped by europeans and it was here that henry morton stanley and the rest of his expedition found something unexpected tucked between these two lakes was a cluster of impressive mountains home to five of africa's ten tallest peaks in fact many of the mountaintops here were tall enough to support their own glaciers whose waters flowed northward in the same direction as the nile these rivulets joined together to form little streams that run through the vegetation a few thousand feet below and the streams combine to form a real river which ultimately becomes the mighty nile of egypt [Music] but wait a group of mountains topped in snow and ice which feed a collection of lakes which altogether flow into the nile are these the mountains of the moon well sort of i mean today they're called the ruins or mountains a name given to them by stanley himself which makes me think he didn't even realize he'd found the only mountains in all of africa that actually resembled the description given to ptolemy some two thousand years ago if what that merchant diogenes told him was in fact true these are likely the mountains he encountered these are the very first drops of the white nile from a glacier melting at the top of ruinsory these drops joined together with the drops from other glaciers to form tiny rivulets which race down the rocky faces yep that's right out of all the expeditions launched with the express purpose of discovering the source of the nile it was somehow this random rescue mission that ended up discovering the only ice feeding into the nile while in reality the volume of water contributed by these mountains to the nile doesn't amount to much with most of the water for the river really coming from the ethiopian highlands the melt waters coming off these glaciers are nonetheless the only year-round source of fresh water feeding into the nile supplying the river with water even during the dry season which argue about it in the comments but at least in my book makes these mountains and really these glaciers the one true source of the nile so it is here on the roof of africa that the nile is born nearly 4 000 miles from its mouth in the mediterranean but that might not be the case for much longer like i said at the start of this video back when i had my voice people have been living around these mountains for thousands of years at this point and the only reason we're paying more attention to the european side of things is that they were the first to start taking scientific records of the ice sheets here and the data that's been collected tells us a story not one of africa's past but of its future one that we should all be too familiar with at this point they show us that the earth's climate is changing mount kenya for example was first summited in 1899 as part of an expedition led by this guy alfred john mckinder amazingly this expedition was equipped with early cameras and took the first ever photographs from atop this mountain giving us some idea as to the amount of ice that was to be found here in total mckinder and his team recorded 18 separate glaciers present at the summit but if we fast forward to look at the earliest satellite images dating back to 1986 or less than a century later we can see by this point only 11 glaciers persisted and from this point until now they've all continued to diminish with total losses estimated at over 45 percent i mean even just comparing photographs taken back then to once taken more recently and we can clearly see just how much ice has been lost at this rate mount kenya is predicted to be entirely ice free by the year 2050 or less than 30 years from now once this happens just two sites containing glaciers will be left in all of africa the next place to see glaciers would be mount kilimanjaro and thanks to its greater altitude kilimanjaro hosts much larger reserves of ice than mount kenya the first time accurate maps could be made of the mountain and its ice was in 1912. 30 years after it was first discovered and by then they looked like this but as the 20th century progressed these glaciers saw an even more drastic reduction in size with nearly 85 of the ice gone since these records were first taken another side to side comparison of photos taken of the summit from the end of the 19th century against modern pictures of kilimanjaro reveal just how substantial these losses truly are where the entire summit can be seen transformed from a glittering white mound down to a rocky pile with ice only barely capping its top overall we can see kilimanjaro isn't doing much better than mount kenya and estimates only give these glaciers until the year 2060 or 40 years from now once this has occurred there will only be one remaining site in all of africa where year-long ice has persevered luckily while both mount kenya and mount kilimanjaro are solitary peaks the ruins zory's stature as a mountain range means there are far more places for glaciers to grow after henry morton stanley first noted these mountains in 1889 it wouldn't be until 1906 almost 20 years later before these mountains were actually summited doing this revealed a total of 43 glaciers found growing on six different peaks within the range totaling more than half of all the glacial ice on the continent but since then like its two southern neighbors the glaciers nestled within the ruins orei mountains have continued to melt with each passing year and okay this is where we get to see just how actively things are changing here you see basically every source and map i've looked at for these glaciers comes from 2006. the last time a major scientific expedition was carried out here what was found was that since these initial records were made more than half of the ice has melted away leaving only around 20 glaciers remaining on three mountaintops mountain baker mount speak and the tallest in the group and the third tallest mountain in all of africa mount stanley but right before finishing the script for this video i came across pictures taken in these mountains from just last year in 2020 by this guy a photographer and conservationist by the name of klaus diamond his photos revealed that ice has now all but abandoned both mount baker and mount speak leaving just one last refuge for glaciers within the entire mountain cluster the photos he took of mount stanley however showed that it'd likely be sooner rather than later that the same happens here and by this point it's only a matter of time before the entire ruinsory range is made iceless now okay i don't want to act like the melting of these glaciers will somehow catastrophically change the world they won't but the trend they reveal will together the disappearing of these african glaciers serves as a sort of finger on the pulse of the earth and by watching what they do we can very clearly see the effects of climate change playing out over a century while it might be hard to notice sea levels changing gradually or the massive ice sheets of antarctica losing a little more ice compared to last year the changes we've witnessed here in africa are irrefutable evidence of the direction the planet's climate is heading in how much hotter has the earth gotten in the past 100 years this much hotter how much more carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere this much more how do these two factors impact our planet this is how i don't know about you but seeing the transformations undergone by these mountains over just the past century does a much better job of illustrating for me the real world implications of climate change than a bunch of graphs with the lines going up ever could in the end all it took for these glaciers to all but disappear before our very eyes was a hundred or so years of emissions after having been a feature on this planet for the past 15 000 years and so while there are surely larger deposits of ice elsewhere in the world we can be sure that they're feeling the same stresses even if it's harder to see because we can see it here and unfortunately a lot of the time when it comes to climate science seeing is believing hey everyone i hope you all enjoyed this was a tricky one not only because i lost my voice but also because there was just so much going on in it and trust me i only touched on like 10 of the information i found and i easily could have made this video much longer than it already is so let me know if you'd like to see more stories like this uh if you'd like to make sure more videos like this one get made you can help support me and the channel by checking out my patreon the link will be on screen other than that subscribe if you haven't already please i'm so close to getting a million subscribers hit that notification bell if you want well the notifications about my uploads and okay if you watched all the way to the end why not give the video a like thanks

Channel: Atlas Pro

Views: 297,422

Rating: 4.8897629 out of 5

Keywords: education, geography, science, atlaspro

Id: 5Mp4UNgTyp4

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021