Word: neem
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...best ways to try to figure out what will happen in the future is to ascertain what happened in the past. That's why we're in Greenland. Our team will be visiting the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project, an international research team that has staked out a corner of the island's ice sheet and will, as the name suggests, drill. The ice in central Greenland is nearly 3 km thick, and as you drill down to the bottom, you can read the climatic history of the island as if you were counting tree rings going back...
...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, want to find out how the Greenland ice sheet reacted to the warming - with the hope that it will give us clues to Greenland's fate in a future that is sure to be hotter...
...first stop on July 30, however, is Kangerlussuaq, the area's main airport and a staging ground for the NEEM project. Kangerlussuaq lies so far north that the sun never really sets in the summer, as I discover during a somewhat sleepless night. And the climate here is anything but Arctic. In the heat of the sun, temperatures exceed 70?F, and I shed layers of fleece as I take a jet-lagged walk around town. Not that there's anything to see: Kangerlussuaq didn't really exist until the Americans began using it as an air base in World...
...Kangerlussuaq, which sits just off the rocky northwest coast of Greenland, is also home to one of the largest glaciers in the world, one that is melting speedily, pouring freshwater and the occasional iceberg into Baffin Bay. After getting properly outfitted for our trip to NEEM the next day - our weather forecast is in the teens, but temperatures really can be polar even during the summer - we take a car trip out to the vanishing edge of the glacier, some 30 km outside town. It's the waning hours of the afternoon, though it's hard to tell; time loses...
...slides behind a verdant neem tree and the scorching heat of the late afternoon eases a few degrees, the last ferry pulls away from the bank of the River Gambia. Normally, the rusting blue barge would be packed with people and vehicles, while the road that runs up to the river would teem with taxis and trucks, traders shouting for business and farmers herding cows and donkeys. But this afternoon, the Gambian port of Farafenni is a ghost town. Bereft of customers, traders are closing their shops, pulling down corrugated shutters and tugging on the padlocks to make sure they...