thePEBBLE - 06/30/06 - Around The Net
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The Saga Of Pinehill, The Adventure
This is a page turner you don't want to put down.
Get your copy today! It will change your life. Go to
http://www.the-pebble.com OR order yours from
your favorite bookstore. ISBN # 1-4137-4723-X
Watch for the sequel
Money, Marriage And The Way, The Saga Of Pinehill Book II
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TODAY'S TRIVIA - - -
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What was the Soccer War?
What was the War of the Roses?
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ANSWERS TO YESTERDAY'S TRIVIA - - - -
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Is there such a thing as a poisonous bird?
Yes. The Hooded Pitohui and the Ifrita, both from New
Guinea, are poisonous. Both carry toxin in their feathers
that make them deadly to eat (thus, unattractive to
predators). (Most likely, they accumulate the toxin from
some kind of plant that they ingest.)
What is the shortest war in history?
The shortest war in history is the one between Zanzibar and
Britain, which lasted 38 minutes. The war started when
Sultan Hamad died on August 25, 1896, and his cousin Hamoud
was declared the new ruler by the British Consul. ANOTHER
cousin, Khaled, disagreed with that declaration and claimed
the palace for himself, raising the Zanzibar flag. Refusing
to recognize Khaled's claim, the British (which had
established Zanzibar as a "protectorate") began firing on
the palace from their gunships. Khaled surrendered 38
minutes later.
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I'LL SEE IT WHEN I BELIEVE IT!
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There are a lot of ways to become a failure,
but never taking a chance is the most successful.
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thePEBBLE CONTENTS:
1. STRANGE BITS AND PIECES!
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2 Title Article . . .
Around The Net
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3. MEDICAL COLUMN by Karin Henderson
Cleaning, Disinfecting, and Sterilizing…
A Few Basic Essentials To Keep In Mind
PART 12 of 12
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4. PERCEPTIONS by Ken Darby
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5. WHY DO WE SAY IT?
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6. THINK ABOUT THIS TODAY!
7. HA! HA!HA!
8. CONTACT INFO
9. THE LAST LINE - - - - -
Get The Saga Of Pinehill, The Adventure
http://the-pebble.com/SAGA/sagamain.html
OR get it at your favorite bookstore. Ask for
ISBN# 1-4137-4723-X from Publish America
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STRANGE BITS AND PIECES!
People who have eaten beetles say that it tastes like
apples.
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TITLE ARTICLE . . .
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Around The Net
Greenland's Ice Sheet Is Slip-Sliding Away
By Robert Lee Hotz, Times Staff Writer
JAKOBSHAVN GLACIER, Greenland — Gripping a bottle of Jack
Daniel's between his knees, Jay Zwally savored the warmth
inside the tiny plane as it flew low across Greenland's
biggest and fastest-moving outlet glacier.
Mile upon mile of the steep fjord was choked with icy rubble
from the glacier's disintegrated leading edge. More than six
miles of the Jakobshavn had simply crumbled into open water.
"My God!" Zwally shouted over the hornet whine of the
engines.
From satellite sensors and seasons in the field, Zwally, 67,
knew the ice sheet below in a way that few could match. Even
after a lifetime of study, the raffish NASA glaciologist
with a silver dolphin in one pierced ear was dismayed by how
quickly the breakup had occurred.
Wedged between boxes of scientific instruments, tent bags,
duffels and survival gear, Zwally had no room to turn inside
the cramped passenger compartment of the twin-engine Otter.
He passed the whiskey bottle over his shoulder to
geophysicist Jose Rial from the University of North
Carolina, squeezed on a jump seat between a surveyor and a
sleeping climatologist.
Homeward bound — windburned, bone-chilled and greasy after
weeks on this immense ice cap tilted like a beret flopped
across the top of the world — they all had been in a
celebratory mood.
Somber now, Zwally and Rial shared a drink in silence as the
shadow of the plane slipped across azure meltwater lakes,
rust-red tundra and silver tongues of ice.
The Greenland ice sheet — two miles thick and broad enough
to blanket an area the size of Mexico — shapes the world's
weather, matched in influence by only Antarctica in the
Southern Hemisphere.
It glows like milky mother-of-pearl. The sheen of ice blends
with drifts of cloud as if snowbanks are taking flight.
In its heartland, snow that fell a quarter of a million
years ago is still preserved. Temperatures dip as low as 86
degrees below zero. Ground winds can top 200 mph. Along the
ice edge, meltwater rivers thread into fraying brown ropes
of glacial outwash, where migrating herds of caribou and
musk ox graze.
The ice is so massive that its weight presses the bedrock of
Greenland below sea level, so all-concealing that not until
recently did scientists discover that Greenland actually
might be three islands.
Should all of the ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could
raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world's coastal
cities, home to a billion people. It would cause higher
tides, generate more powerful storm surges and, by altering
ocean currents, drastically disrupt the global climate.
Climate experts have started to worry that the ice cap is
disappearing in ways that computer models had not predicted.
By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice
as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets
of Antarctica — the world's largest reservoir of fresh water
— also are shrinking, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in
February.
Zwally and other researchers have focused their attention on
a delicate ribbon — the equilibrium line, which marks the
fulcrum of frost and thaw in Greenland's seasonal balance.
The zone runs around the rim of the ice cap like a
drawstring. Summer melting, on average, offsets the annual
accumulation of snow.
Across the ice cap, however, the area of seasonal melting
was broader last year than in 27 years of record-keeping,
University of Colorado climate scientists reported. In early
May, temperatures on the ice cap some days were almost 20
degrees above normal, hovering just below freezing.
From cores of ancient Greenland ice extracted by the
National Science Foundation, researchers have identified at
least 20 sudden climate changes in the last 110,000 years,
in which average temperatures fluctuated as much as 15
degrees in a single decade.
The increasingly erratic behavior of the Greenland ice has
scientists wondering whether the climate, after thousands of
years of relative stability, may again start oscillating.
The Theory at Work
Huddled inside a red cook tent atop 3,900 feet of ice,
Zwally shoveled snow into a pot simmering on a two-ring
propane camp stove.
He had to melt enough to boil lobster tails for dinner.
Zwally, who works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md., had purchased them at Costco and lugged them
to Greenland.
The beating wings of a 30-mph wind slapped against the tent
fabric. Every 15 minutes, a gust sucked open the door and
frosted the room.
The tent — buried in drifts and entered by a ladder through
a hatch in the roof — was part of Swiss Camp, located 155
miles north of the Arctic Circle.
For those assessing the effect of global warming, there may
be no more perfect place than this warren of red tents on
the Northern Hemisphere's largest ice cap. Here, the
theoretical effects seen in computerized climate models take
tangible form.
University of Colorado climatologist Konrad Steffen set up
Swiss Camp in 1990 to study the weather along the
equilibrium line. As a precaution, Steffen, 54, built the
camp on a plywood platform to keep it afloat when the ice
turns into summer slush and open lakes before refreezing in
the fall.
Even so, Steffen and Zwally often spent days chiseling out
tables and chairs had frozen in floodwater into a single
block of ice.
Zwally joined his colleagues there on May 8 in the regular
spring migration of scientists to the Arctic.
He has been coming to Swiss Camp every year since 1994 and
has been studying the polar regions since 1972, monitoring
the polar ice through satellite sensors.
Eventually he realized he had to study the ice firsthand.
The ice sheet seemed such a stolid reservoir of cold that
many experts had been confident of it taking centuries for
higher temperatures to work their way thousands of feet down
to the base of the ice cap and undermine its stability.
By and large, computer models supported that view,
predicting that as winter temperatures rose, more snow would
fall across the dome of the ice cap. Thus, by the seasonal
bookkeeping of the ice sheet, Greenland would neatly balance
its losses through new snow.
Indeed, Zwally and his colleagues in March released an
analysis of data from two European remote-sensing satellites
showing the amount of water locked up in the ice sheet had
risen slightly between 1992 and 2002.
Then the ice sheet began to confound computer-generated
predictions.
By 2005, Greenland was beginning to lose more ice volume
than anyone expected — an annual loss of up to 52 cubic
miles a year — according to more recent satellite gravity
measurements released by JPL.
The amount of freshwater ice dumped into the Atlantic Ocean
has almost tripled in a decade.
"We are clearly seeing the effects of climate change
starting to kick in," Zwally said.
Since Steffen started monitoring the weather at Swiss Camp
in 1991, the average winter temperature has risen almost 10
degrees. Last year, the annual melt zone reached farther
inland and up to higher elevations than ever before.
There was even a period of melting in December.
"We have never seen that," Steffen said, combing the ice
crystals from his beard. "It is significantly warmer now,
and it happened quite suddenly. This year, the temperatures
were warmer than I have ever experienced."
At this time of year, the sun never sets, and at Swiss Camp,
the pace of field work slackens only for dinner.
Layered in fleece, the field researchers gathered around a
makeshift plywood table littered with heels of whole grain
bread, pots of raspberry jam and crumbs of granola. A ridge
of ice 6 inches high encased an electrical cable running
between their feet.
Their cheeks were coarse with stubble. Their hair rose in
waxy spikes. Their eyes had reddened from insomnia and too
much midnight sun.
While one researcher spooned out the first course — pasta in
a sauce of sun-dried tomatoes — another opened the last
bottle of the 2003 Cotes du Rhone.
Zwally tended the pot on the stove.
The Greenland ice sheet was in the same predicament as his
frozen lobsters, steaming in meltwater.
Getting Into the Ice
The pilot refused to land. There were too many crevasses.
Steffen waved him on to fly farther inland. He checked their
position by satellite every few hundred yards.
After 34 years in the Arctic, Steffen was attuned to its
subtleties. Where a novice could only see a monochromatic
plain stretching to the horizon, Steffen could discern the
undulating outlines left by seasonal lakes and riverbeds.
Clear of the hazard, the Otter touched down and glided on
its skis to a halt on an inviting featherbed of snow.
Steffen and his crew unloaded crates of equipment and began
drilling into the ice. Zwally, stripping wires with bare
fingers in the biting wind, hooked up a satellite receiver.
Within the hour, they erected a tall mast festooned with
monitoring instruments.
They continued to hopscotch by air across the ice sheet,
planting sensors at every stop.
As spring comes earlier each year, alpine glaciers recede,
hurricanes gather power and other signs of climate change
accrue, the research team tries to understand how the
Greenland ice sheet can respond so quickly to rising
temperatures.
"How does climate change get into the ice?" Zwally asked.
Most of the computer models on which climate predictions are
based did not take the dynamics of the glaciers into
account.
Contrary to appearances, the monolith of ice is constantly
on the move, just as Southern California, driven by plate
tectonics, inches every year toward Alaska.
In that sense, the Swiss Camp is a measure of shifting
property values.
The camp has been rafting on the ice stream toward the sea,
on average, at about 1 foot every day. Since Steffen pitched
the main tents, the camp has moved about a mile downhill.
When Zwally started tracking the velocity of the ice with
Global Positioning System sensors in 1996, the ice flow
maintained a steady pace all year.
But he soon discovered that the ice around Swiss Camp had
abruptly shifted gears in the summer, moving faster when the
surface ice started to melt. By 1999, the ice stream had
almost tripled its speed to about 3 feet a day.
In an influential paper published in Science, Zwally
surmised that the ice sheets had accelerated in response to
warmer temperatures, as summer meltwater lubricated the base
of the ice sheet and allowed it to slide faster toward the
sea.
In a way no one had detected, the warm water made its way
through thousands of feet of ice to the bedrock — in weeks,
not decades or centuries.
So much water streamed beneath the ice that in high summer
the entire ice sheet near Swiss Camp briefly bulged 2 feet
higher, like the crest of a subterranean wave.
"This meltwater acceleration is new," Zwally said. "The
significance of this is that it is a mechanism for climate
change to get into the ice."
To better track the seasonal movements, Zwally and Steffen
set up two new GPS stations around Swiss Camp, while a team
led by University of Vermont geophysicist Tom Neumann
erected an additional 10 GPS sensors to map the changing
velocity of the local ice.
At the same time, University of Texas physicist Ginny
Catania pulled an ice-penetrating radar in a search pattern
around the camp, seeking evidence of any melt holes or
drainage crevices that could so quickly channel the hot
water of global warming deep into the ice.
To her surprise, she detected a maze of tunnels, natural
pipes and cracks beneath the unblemished surface.
"I have never seen anything like it, except in an area where
people have been drilling bore holes," Catania said.
No one knows how much of the ice sheet is affected.
Since 2002, Greenland's three largest outlet glaciers have
started moving faster, satellite data show.
On the eastern edge of Greenland, the Kangerlussuaq Glacier,
like the Jakobshavn, has surged, doubling its pace. To the
west, the Helheim Glacier now appears to be moving about
half a football field every day.
In all, 12 major outlet glaciers drain the ice sheet the way
rivers drain a watershed, setting the pace of its release to
the ocean.
If they all slide too quickly, there is a possibility that,
perhaps decades from now, they could collapse suddenly and
release the entire ice sheet into the ocean.
"They are like the buttresses of the high cathedral," said
Rial, the North Carolina geophysicist. "If you remove the
buttress, the cathedral will collapse."
The accelerating ice flow has been accompanied by a dramatic
increase in seismic activity, as the three immense streams
of ice shake the Earth in their wake.
The lurching ice has generated swarms of earthquakes up to
magnitude 5.0, researchers at Harvard University and the
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University
reported in March.
Last year alone, the Harvard and Columbia researchers
detected as many ice quakes as the total recorded from 1993
through 1996, with five times as many in the summer as in
the winter months.
"Instability is the key," Rial said.
In the Swiss Camp laboratory tent, Rial moved his finger
along the jagged seismic trace displayed on his iBook
screen.
The signal had been detected by the 10 sensors he had placed
around the camp six days before.
The ice sheet was trembling.
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Joy, on a daily basis, results from going inside and
learning to commune with your Maker. Of course,
if you don't want joy . . .
---- Ken Darby
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MEDICAL COLUMN - - - -
by Karin Henderson
Cleaning, Disinfecting, and Sterilizing…
A Few Basic Essentials To Keep In Mind
PART 12 of 12
Third example: you cut a finger and blood is dripping
down. A good first aid book (also front of phone book)
will tell you to clean it under running water, assess
the damage. Go to an emergency department if you think
it needs stitches. If you feel it doesn’t, wrap a clean
towel around it and hold your hand above your heart
level, until it stops bleeding. Do not put anything on
the wound. If in doubt, visit a care clinic. You do not
want any chemicals in that wound. Do not use alcohol as
it is known to kill those delicate cells that the cut
has exposed. And don’t use soap either: it will seep
into the open cut.
Last example: you are faced with a sink full of dirty
dishes from someone who has the flu. You have several
choices. You can soak them in bleach. (That’s what
hospitals used to do before they switched to disposal
dishes for “isolation” patients.) You can place the
dishes into an electric dishwasher. You can wear rubber
gloves, wash them well in soap and water, let them rest
in bleach for at least five minutes, RINSE THEM, dry
them, and put them away. (Check the container for the
strength and soaking instructions.)
Do you ever go down the household cleaner aisle in your
grocery store and have your eyes run or your nose feel
funny? Don’t you just want to get out of there as soon
as possible? Those are chemicals you are being exposed
to and for many people, adding a few more chemicals to
their already overloaded bodies, can cause grief. We
need these types of chemicals at the proper time and
place, using them the correct way. Use them wisely and
carefully. The lifestyle you protect will be your own.
-------------------------------------------
Karin Henderson is a registered nurse and is thePEBBLE's
columnist for our MEDICAL COLUMN.
We appreciate her input very much. Thanks Karin.
You can send Karin questions at
mailto:kflh@shaw.ca
Health Information Newsletter.
http://www.prescotts-inc.com
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PERCEPTIONS . . . by Ken Darby
-----------------------DISCLAIMER
Some around me think I am an opinionated old goat.
Whether that be true or not I will sometimes, in this column,
talk about things people don't like to talk about - or don't want
out in the open. Take it all with a grain of salt.
Do your own thinking, and don't accept the things I say as
gospel. They are only mental meanderings from a simple soul.
-----------------------END DISCLAIMER
I find the title article interesting. Some might find it
scary, but, as there is nothing we can do about it we can
only prepare for what the consequences will be.
To have the sea level rise 21 feet all over the world is an
immense thing. Yet that won't happen all at once. It will
take time for these things to complete plus that figure was
thrown out if the ice cap melts completely. That is highly
unlikely unless the earth shifts on its axis.
Also, I have no doubt man has had a major affect on global
warming and that may be contributing. However, I am also
knowledgeable enough to know there are cycles the earth goes
through. This may have happened in spite of man's
activities.
But what does it mean? It means as is happening in the
Pacific right now, there will be a continuing loss of land
to rising seal levels. Places that will be hit the hardest
will be the Pacific islands and coastal cities everywhere in
the world. Close to home, that means New York and Los
Angeles and San Francisco. In Canada it means Vancouver,
Victoria and, believe it or not the cities along the St.
Lawrence and the Great Lakes.
It appears as if we will be hearing more about this as time
goes by.
This is a natural evolutionary cycle. Fear not but go inside
to commune with your Maker. There you will find that all
will be well.
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WHY DO WE SAY IT?
Lager Beer: How did "lager beer" get that name?
The German word lager means a "storehouse". The barrels of
lager beer are placed in a storehouse for their contents to
age.
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THINK ABOUT THIS TODAY!
"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to
someone else." -- Erma Bombeck
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HA! HA! HA!
There was a fence that divided Heaven from Hell. One day
God notices that the devil's side is in pretty bad shape.
So God hollers over the fence, "Hey Satan, why don't you
fix up your side of the fence?"
Satan hollers back, "Why don't you mind your own business?"
So God says, "I'll hire a lawyer and sue you if you don't!"
The devil says, "Ha! Where are YOU gonna find a lawyer?"
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CONTACT INFORMATION:
Complete Contact info on web site
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THE LAST LINE - - - - -
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the
arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and
blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short
again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the
great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high
achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at
least fails while daring greatly." -- Theodore
Roosevelt
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REMEMBER! - IF YOU SEE IT IN thePEBBLE - IT IS SO!
Ignorance is no excuse under the laws of your Maker any more
than they are under the laws of man. The laws exist. If you learn them
and use them to your advantage you prosper. If you decline and
continue to conduct your life as if they do not exist then it is an
absolute certainty you will do less, have less and be less than your
peak.
---- Ken Darby
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