Word: peninsulas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Within the past year, scientists watched in awe as a giant ice shelf disintegrated in the Antarctic Peninsula in just over one month's time, and in a remote region of West Antarctica, satellites have detected an expanse where glaciers are worrisomely speeding up their transport...
...hard to gauge what these dramatic developments portend, for despite scientists' best efforts, Antarctica--the highest, dryest, coldest continent on the planet--remains a climatological cipher. For example, while it is clear that the Antarctic Peninsula--a thin sliver of land that juts above the Antarctic Circle--has been rapidly warming, the vast empty spaces of East Antarctica, repository of the greatest ice sheet on earth, appear to be doing the opposite. "Here we have a continent that is so important to our future," says earth scientist Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago...
...government have dried up. Corruption is rampant, with poachers depleting the region's vast fisheries. Nature reserves are under threat from mining and energy projects. Electricity is frequently shut down, even during the brutal winters. As a park ranger noted while guiding us through the thermal springs of the peninsula's Valley of Geysers, "This is the only place in Kamchatka where they can't cut off your hot water...
...Part of the "Ring of Fire," the string of volcanoes that encircles the Pacific Ocean, Kamchatka has more than 100 volcanoes, 29 of them active, along with spectacular concentrations of geysers and thermal springs. For nine months a year, snow blankets the peninsula, and only by July does it melt sufficiently to enable comfortable hiking. Well, let's say relatively comfortable. During our mid-August trek, it rained half the time. Much of the interior is accessible only by helicopter, and tourists who fly into a volcanic site for an afternoon can occasionally be stranded for days...
...Despite the bellicose rhetoric coming out of North Korea, most Japanese remain relatively unconcerned about the possibility of a nuclear attack. They still believe that the U.S. will protect them from Pyongyang's threatened "sea of fire." But Japan's political leaders do worry about the peninsula: as they see it, a breakthrough in relations between North and South Korea that freezes out Japan and the U.S. would be a regional disaster. Indeed, many people believe that the Japanese government would rewrite the peace constitution if faced with a real prospect of Korean unification or of the U.S. withdrawing...