Word: sheete
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...discover when our visiting group (a collection of journalists, scientists and Danish environmental officials) decamps from the C-130 Hercules transport plane that brought us to NEEM. It's maybe --9°C (16°F) on the ice--balmy, as far as summertime goes on the Greenland ice sheet. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, the motherly Danish field leader of the NEEM project, greets us at the camp's main kitchen, dining room and work space: a toasty geodesic dome straight from the winter dreams of Buckminster Fuller. I quickly learn that a great deal of time in an arctic research camp...
...flags that mark the boundaries of the camp, the red sleeping tents and the heated main dome, a geodesic wooden structure that is the kitchen, conference center and overall heart of NEEM. The result is scary, when I ponder how tiny and isolated I am against this vast sheet of ice, a white void without plants, animals or even rocks. It's also really, really cool...
...Greenland with a team of scientists, Danish officials (Greenland is a loosely governed Danish territory) and other journalists to visit a research project that may help answer one of the most important questions in climate science today: Will global warming melt the Greenland ice sheet? The massive ice sheet that covers all but the rocky coasts of Greenland is a relic of the last Ice Age. If it were to melt, it would release enough water to raise global sea levels by some 7 m - and that would spell the end for major coastal cities like New York City...
...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 tens of thousands of years. Oxygen isotopes...
...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...