Word: greenlander
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...quantum physics - it?s hard to make accurate predictions about what will happen. So it came as no surprise, in a sense, that climate observers announced a huge surprise yesterday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science?s annual conference, in St. Louis: the glaciers of Greenland, which carry ice from the interior out to the sea, have gone on a tear. They?re flowing, on average, about twice as fast as they were a decade ago - and even back then, says glacier expert Julian Dowdeswell, of the University of Cambridge, "I was telling my students that they...
...Greenland?s ice were plopped into the ocean, sea level would rise a catastrophic 20 feet or more. Until yesterday, most experts thought global warming might make it happen in a couple of thousand years. Now they?re talking hundreds. It still sounds like a long time, but, says Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton, "that comes to a couple of feet per century, and that?s more than society is equipped to handle." It doesn?t, moreover, take into account the two mammoth ice sheets of Antarctica, which pack about 20 and 200 feet...
...interesting political note: Eric Rignot, the lead author of the Greenland study and an accompanying report in Science magazine, works for NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (the glaciers? speedup was detected with a satellite). Just a couple of weeks ago, another NASA scientist named James Hansen claimed he?d been silenced by the agency for speaking out about evidence for global warming; the resulting furor led the NASA official who was involved to resign. Hansen?s commentary on the Greenland result appears here. And when Rignot was asked yesterday whether anyone at the agency had tried to shut...
...study, titled ?Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change?: it?s a summary of research presented at a conference of the same name last year. But it does point out that the temperature need only rise about halfway to the worst-case scenario for such catastrophic events as the melting of the Greenland ice cap, or, worse yet, the West Antarctic ice sheet. The latter event could raise sea levels a whopping 5 meters, or about 16 ft., which could drown huge swaths of low-lying coastland and essentially wipe out countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives. Modest temperature increases could also shut...
...Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg. Denmark's exploitation of Greenland's mineral resources seems an unlikely background for a detective thriller about the mysterious death of a six-year-old Inuit boy. Unlikely too is the investigator, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, a woman caught between the native Greenland culture of her hunter-tracker mother and the well-appointed world of her Danish father, a physician and scientist. Like Ross Macdonald in his Lew Archer novels of darkest California, Hoeg creates an unfamiliar but palpable world that steadily envelops the reader...