Word: snow
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Back in the good old days, our great grandparents used to trudge to school through the snow on a piece of ground that somehow managed to have an incline in both directions...
...wetter future or a dryer future. It might even mean a wetter future with no net gain." How is that possible? The answer lies in the impact rising temperatures are likely to have on the vast reservoirs of water locked up in the mountains in the form of snow...
This is important because in the West most precipitation falls as snow at higher elevations. Thus, a city like Reno, Nevada, gets, on average, just over 7 in. of precipitation a year, vs. some 70 in. at the top of nearby Mount Rose. During the 1950s drought, for example, a very large portion of the West, along with a big chunk of the Southeast and Great Plains, experienced long-term shortfalls of both winter snows and summer rains. "This is the kind of drought we worry about a lot," says Betancourt--and it's the kind of drought that...
Scientists have documented a troubling shrinkage of the snowpack across the West, owing at least in part to the fact that rising temperatures are inexorably forcing the snow line higher. They have also found that the snowmelt is starting earlier in spring, as many as four weeks earlier in the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades. And that likewise poses a problem. Why? Snow and ice are like natural dams that hold water back during the winter months, when the risk of flooding is highest, and then melt and release it during the dry months of summer when moisture...
Clarke is an extremely funny writer, which is rare in fantasy--Rowling is sometimes goofy, but Clarke is genuinely witty. But what really sets Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell apart is its treatment of magic. Clarke's magic is a melancholy, macabre thing, confabulated out of snow and rain and mirrors and described with absolute realism; it's even documented with faux-scholarly footnotes. When spells are cast (and they frequently are--Clarke isn't one of those stingy fantasists who doles out, say, one spell every hundred pages), they come with consequences of both the intended and the unintended varieties...