Word: peninsulas
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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...
Like Julius Caesar's Gaul, the ice that covers Antarctica is divided into three parts. There is the small ice of the Antarctic Peninsula. There is the big ice that covers the solid, continental block of East Antarctica to a depth, in places, of nearly three miles. And there is the middle-size ice of West Antarctica, much of which lies below sea level, so that its outermost fringes come into potentially perilous contact with seawater...
...currents and wave action and as buttresses that provide structural support. In fact, the absence of ice shelves may be the reason that glaciers in the remote Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica are speeding up their transport of ice to the sea. Earlier this year, in the Antarctic Peninsula, the Larsen B ice shelf showed what can happen when conditions warm. First, rising summer temperatures created meltwater ponds on the surface of the ice shelf, allowing water to pour into cracks. Then pressure exerted by the inflow of water deepened the cracks as relentlessly as a wedge splitting...
South Korea's leaders insist that the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula can be defused by maintaining peaceful dialogue with North Korea's erratic dictator Kim Jong Il. But black clouds fell across the South's "Sunshine Policy" last week. First, a special envoy sent by Seoul to Pyongyang was rebuffed?the Dear Leader, it seems, was too busy touring the nation's fallow farms. Then North Korea, responding to U.S. President George W. Bush's stern State of the Union address, turned its bellicose rhetoric up to 11, calling Bush "a shameless charlatan." The Stalinist country then appeared...