Word: coreness
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...power struggle between his supporters and those of Mbeki has been immensely damaging to a party whose moral authority as a liberation movement has plunged in its era of governance, buffeted by corruption scandals, an inability to tackle rising crime and unemployment, and the unseemly spectacle of some its core members and backers becoming billionaires while much of the country remains mired in poverty. At the weekend, former ANC stalwart the Reverend Allan Boesak even accused his party of resurrecting "racial divisions and ethnic categorization" through its pro-black affirmative action programs...
...core science is incredibly important, because it can help us understand how climate changed in the past - and how it might change in the future. It's also, as the participants in the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project will tell you, incredibly fun. Where else can you snowmobile all day across some of the finest piste in the world, carve 200-year-old ice cores in a polar cave that would make Superman swoon, and relax at night (night being relative, since the sun never sets during the Arctic summer) with copious amounts of Carlsberg beer delivered...
...there's no shortage of work to be done. A kilometer and a half outside the main camp, Sigfus Johann Johnsen and Steffen Bo Hansen drill for shallow ice cores. This is a side project, a much smaller drill that can bore down 70 m or so below the surface, which covers the past few hundred years of climatic history. At this depth what they bring back is not solid ice, but a half-snow, half-ice substance called firn. It's solid but porous, so it can trap some of the gas present in the atmosphere when it accumulated...
...liter Heineken mini-kegs. Jimi Hendrix and Dr. Dre are playing on the stereo in the main dome. NEEM has no shortage of grad students like Trevor Popp, who describes himself as "34 going on 12," and they know how to have fun. Don't get me wrong. Ice-core science is all hard work - especially the painstaking analysis of the ice cores back in the lab - but only a certain kind of scientist chooses to spend weeks on an isolated ice cap, and I suspect that kind of scientist is a lot more fun to hang out with than...
Such experiments have been done in Greenland and Antarctica for decades, with ice cores that can track climatic history up to 800,000 years ago, and they've helped form the bulk of our knowledge about past climate change. But the timeline is patchy, especially in Greenland, where we haven't been able to get a reliable ice core dating from 115,000 to 130,000 years ago. That's the Eemian period, and during those years the earth was some 5?C warmer than it is today. The NEEM scientists, whose ice cores should track back to that period...