Mount Fuji 'naked' again after several days of snow

According to NASA Earth Observatory , the snowfall on Mount Fuji (Japan) on November 6 only lasted a few short days.

The news channel, founded in 1999, compared and concluded through two photos. One was taken by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) remote sensing tool on the Landsat 8 Earth observation satellite on November 9. The comparison photo was taken on October 30, 2023, by OLI-2 on Landsat 9.

Mount Fuji as seen on November 9 and October 30, 2023. (Photo: Wanmei Liang/NASA).

This year, it snowed on Mount Fuji 5/10, and ice crystals were still there 25 days later. But this year, the phenomenon only lasted 3 days.

"The first snow on the volcano's summit in early November apparently disappeared within days, and it was the last snow in 130 years. This unprecedented delay comes after a summer of record-breaking temperatures across Japan and an unusually warm autumn ," author Lindsey Doermann wrote in a post on November 19.

According to observations by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), the country's average summer temperature from June to August was 1.76 degrees Celsius higher than the 1991-2020 average.

The figure is similar to the summer of 2023 - the country's hottest summer since 1898. Above-average temperatures continued to be recorded here in the fall.

Snow on Mount Fuji on November 6. (Photo: @goodandbadjapan).

Across Japan, more than 120 million people experienced "unusually hot weather" in the first week of October, with more than 70 cities in the cherry blossom country recording temperatures of 30°C or higher, according to a report by Climate Central.

This phenomenon has also been recorded at the summit of Mount Fuji and is believed to be the reason why snow does not fall at the right time.

The image of the bare green peak of Mount Fuji makes visitors feel strange because the place is usually covered with snow all year round. During the climbing season (July-September), about 220,000 visitors climb more than 3,700 m to watch the sunrise. The spectacular view of this cone-shaped mountain from afar has also inspired many authors, artists, poets and even tourism workers.