Word: planetful
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Alexander McQueen's life story was one of irresistible contradictions - the taxi driver's son who made clothes for some of the richest people on the planet, the foul-mouthed ruffian with a sublime eye and adroit hands. His death on Feb. 11 at the age of 40 was in keeping with this theme: on the cusp of showing a new collection at Paris fashion week, the head of his own profitable label could apparently see no joy in what lay before him. McQueen died the same way he did everything else: unexpectedly, controversially and as unbelievably as possible...
Glaciers are thought to change at, well, a glacial pace. Certainly that has been true throughout the planet's history. The current ice age - known as the Pilocene-Quatenary glaciation, which began 2.6 million years ago - has witnessed some 20 cycles of glacial (freezing) and interglacial (thawing) periods, with ice sheets advancing and retreating completely on roughly 100,000-year time scales. But scientists are unsure exactly what prompts the shifts in cycles...
...glacial periods, vast ice sheets cover much of the planet, and sea levels are as much as 130 meters lower than they are today (all that extra water is locked up in ice). During interglacial periods - we are enjoying one now, East Coast blizzards notwithstanding - the ice sheets retreat, the glaciers melt and sea level rises. The expansive but quickly melting ice sheets of Greenland, the North Pole and Antarctica are all that is left of our last glacial period, which reached its peak about 20,000 years...
...have been higher 81,000 years ago than today is that the Earth was receiving stronger solar radiation at that time. That would fit into what's known as the Milankovitch theory of ice-age cycles, which posits that the Earth's orbit around the sun and the planet's axial tilt wobble periodically, increasing or decreasing the amount of solar radiation hitting the planet's surface. "The sea-level high may be considered an exception to the 100,000-year cycle, in which high summer sunlight caused the ice sheets to melt," writes R. Lawrence Edwards, a geologist...
...think you're more successful than you are, you should have to waste $130,000 on a Maserati. These days, no one owns any other kind of hybrid, because you can't tell from a distance that they're hybrids. If GM made a car shaped like a crying planet, it could give our government all its money back. (See the history of the electric...