Word: aires
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From 30,000 ft. in the air, the Greenland ice cap seems impregnable, nearly 800 trillion gal. of frozen water locked safely away. But get closer and the cracks begin to emerge. Dancing by helicopter above the mouth of the Jakobshavn Glacier, near the western coast of Greenland, you can make out veins of the purest blue meltwater running between folds of ice. What you can't see is Jakobshavn's inexorable slide toward the sea at 65 ft. to 115 ft. a day--an alarming rate that has accelerated in recent years. As the glacier nears the coast...
...Depth is time, and the lower you go, the further back in history you travel. As ice formed in Greenland, year after cold year, bits of atmosphere were trapped in the layers. Drilling into the ice and fishing out samples--ice cores--that contain tiny bubbles of that ancient air can reveal the temperature, the concentration of greenhouse gases, even the ambient dust from the year that layer was formed. It's like tree rings but for climatic history. "In order to predict the future, we have to understand the past," says Minik Rosing, a geologist at the University...
...hope hasn't vanished. You need that comfort when you're standing on a rocky hilltop in Greenland, watching the ice disappear. As Jakobshavn gives way to the fjord, a stadium-size iceberg suddenly implodes, disintegrating like a collapsing skyscraper. I watch as a plume of mist fills the air where the iceberg once was, while the fjord churns on. And then I wonder, Just how much time do Greenland and the rest of us have before it's too late? That may be up to us--and the heroes we choose to follow...
...course, there weren't a lot of warnings that houses were becoming too valuable (or calls for greater regulation of anything) from the politicians and commentators who are now so indignant. What was not so obvious was the ability of real estate, which has always had a slightly rakish air, to drag even the most respectable and conservative parts of the economy down with it. Other problem areas, like Social Security, also have a Ponzi-scheme flavor: the claims on some pile of money exceed the size of the pile. In many of these schemes, the average American plays both...
...years as president and chief executive of the National Environmental Trust, Philip Clapp fought for legislation to combat global warming. He even once called into question Vice President Al Gore's commitment to the environment because of the White House's "failure to provide any leadership on the clean-air standards and on climate changes." Prior to his time with the Trust, Clapp worked on the U.S. House Budget Committee's environmental task force, where he tried, to no avail, to get the U.S. to ratify the Kyoto treaty. It has since been adopted by most developed nations...