Word: oxygenation
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...completely inadequate for climbing at high altitude in the Himalayas. Even though I had pretty good resistance to cold in my feet, that first trip I definitely had cold feet. But we still made a lot of new summits and we really did extremely well. We weren't using oxygen that trip. The highest mountain we climbed was just over 22,000 feet...
...glaciers in Antarctica at the time? Paleo-climate experts have seen hints of this oddity before, but the new Science paper nails it down much more firmly. Andre Bornemann, of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, along with several colleagues, got their information by analyzing the amount of the isotope oxygen-18 in foraminifera, tiny, shelled sea dwellers that thrived at the time. It turns out that when water evaporates from the sea but doesn't return (implying that it's trapped up on land somewhere, frozen), the ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 in seawater changes...
What researchers found was a stretch of a few hundred thousand years during which foraminifera shells were unusually rich in oxygen-18, suggesting the presence of glaciers. Though changes in ocean temperature can also alter the oxygen balance, sea-bottom temperatures don't vary much no matter what's happening up top, yet the bottom-dwelling foraminifera still exhibited an oxygen imbalance, implying that the ice effect was more likely. Nobody can explain how you can have glaciers in a superhot world. But then, nobody can really explain how the world got quite that hot in the first place...
...boarded the Airbus A300 owned by former Indian Airlines engineer B.C. Gupta. Take, for example, the safety demonstration. After asking for a volunteer from the 120 or so kids crammed, some two to a seat, in the plane's economy-class cabin, flight attendant Ridhi Sehgal explains how the oxygen masks work. A plastic deck chair appears, and Sehgal helps the volunteer, a worried-looking boy of 7, up onto it so that the other passengers can see him. "This is just for show," Sehgal explains. "You don't have to stand on your chair. The oxygen will drop down...
Redefining the land won't give winemakers "any more oxygen right now," says Stephen Leroux, marketing director for Bollinger. To handle any potential shortfalls, the INAO is requiring that winegrowers set aside some of their yield when harvests are good. Ordinary champagne can be sold 15 months after harvest; vintage champagne, say, a Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill ($180 for the '96) must age at least three years, and a Bollinger Champagne Grande Année ($110 for the '97) must age at least five years...