Word: sheetly
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...peppered with exclamation points: Go to the gym three times a week! Call parents more often! Get more sleep! Eat more healthily! The paper was still as clean as next month’s calendar page. The list reminded me of nothing so much as the cardboard-and-bed-sheet boat in the New Year’s Eve parade, that other embodiment of the promise of a new year untainted by cynicism or disappointment. Before long the cardboard would succumb to the rain and wilt; before long my blockmate would stay up too late, eat unhealthily, neglect her parents...
Sooner or later the big bergs will move off and break up. What they will leave behind is a vague sense of menace. For the parent of the big bergs, the Ross Ice Shelf, is a floating extension of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which, for the past 10,000 years, has been slowly slipping into the sea. Should that ice sheet start a more rapid slide, it would trigger a lot more havoc than a few hulking icebergs...
...most obvious danger lies in the melting that would occur if the temperature of Antarctica's salty, frigid waters climbed well above freezing. A greater if less obvious danger is that rising sea levels could undermine the ice sheet, triggering its collapse. Experts are concerned that if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet broke apart in this fashion, global sea levels could rise as much as 16 ft. in just a few decades...
Other factors affect the ice sheet's stability. One of the most important is the balance between the rate at which the ice sheet is growing (because of snowfall) and the rate at which it is shrinking. An ice sheet is, in essence, a viscous plateau, and under the burden of its own weight it is ever so slowly sliding downhill. Because of variations in underlying terrain, however, its slide is not uniform. In the Ross Sea sector, for example, ice is most efficiently conveyed out of the ice sheet's interior by ice streams, which spill onto the Ross...
...still do not know precisely what caused the warming or how Antarctica responded. One group argues that during this time significant expanses of the White Continent were not merely ice free but covered with low-lying, tundra-type vegetation. But Marchant and his colleagues contend that the vast ice sheet that covers the Antarctic plateau rode out the temperature rise unperturbed...