erhebung

Cracked

Fairly epic:

An ice island four times the size of Man­hattan broke off from one of Greenland’s two main glaciers, sci­ent­ists said on Friday, in the biggest such event in the Arctic in nearly 50 years.

The new ice island, which broke off on Thursday, will enter a remote place called the Nares Strait, about 620 miles south of the North Pole between Green­land and Canada.

The ice island has an area of 100 square miles (260 square km) and a thick­ness up to half the height of the Empire State Building, said Andreas Muenchow, pro­fessor of ocean science and engin­eering at the Uni­ver­sity of Delaware.

The Nares Strait (had to check that definite article, as Reuters uses it but Wiki­pedia omits it) looks like a place I’d like to visit. And Hans Island, situated in (the) Nares Strait, is subject to a ter­rit­orial dispute: Denmark and Canada, head to head (what a war that would be).

Wonder where the new island will go.

Digging Our Graves

Gasland, a doc­u­mentary film about hydraulic frac­turing, provides more proof, if proof were needed, that we are drawing ever closer to a grim future. The film presents the evidence too vividly, makes its case too cogently, for me to effect­ively sum­marise it here. But basic­ally, the world is beau­tiful, a gift, and we’ve found yet another way to shit all over it; and worse, our entire system (cap­it­alist, cor­porate: call it whatever you like) is enabling people, com­panies, to do this unhindered. Watching it shocked me not because of what was hap­pening, as I knew about that, but because of the scale of it all: I had no idea what was occuring was occuring in so many places and was creating so much damage. Needs to be seen.

Are We Watching?

SkyTruth is a website devoted to providing news on the BP oil spill (or leak, or disaster). I found it via The Browser, I think, and it is one of the first feeds I check when I open Google Reader. In an inter­esting turn of events, during their analysis of satel­lite imagery of the BP spill, SkyTruth has dis­covered another leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The story has been unfolding over the last couple of weeks, and a couple of days ago the site requested help from the public: it wanted to see the “new” spill up close. In response, a pho­to­grapher, J. Henry Flair, got in a plane and flew over the area of the sus­pected leak, sending the pho­to­graphs he took to SkyTruth, who prompty pub­lished them, with further analysis. It’s good journ­alism, and journ­alism that is using tech­no­logy well: crowd-​sourcing online, data-​mining from public satel­lite records, and working with the clear and unam­biguous aim of informing the public.

In their latest post SkyTruth ask: is anybody watching what’s going on out there? It’s a good question. Is anyone actually mon­it­oring, daily, the status of oil wells in our oceans? We have the satel­lites, but beyond sites like SkyTruth, are we actually using them? Are we doing the best we can with the tech­no­logy we have at our disposal? Isn’t this some­thing gov­ern­ments, or the oil com­panies them them­selves, should be doing publicly, transparently?

A Magic Glimmering Realm

More on coral over at Google Books:

Ever since European explorers began to rove the tropic oceans, the Western world hs vaguely dis­cerned the phant­asmagoria of coral isles rising, palm-​fringed and surf-​ruffled, amid the blue des­ol­a­tion of the sea. As the cen­turies passed the image sharpened; new details emerged — of island neck­laces ringing bright tur­quoise lagoons, and many an arched beach of pastel sands. Below the sun-​spangled satin of the waters there loomed a fabulous world of living creatures, more prolific and colorful than any known to man, a magic glim­mering realm of flower­like animals, giant clams and gaudy fish with iri­des­cent scales of gold and silver, ruby and emerald, glinting among the groves and grottoes of the coral gardens.

People wrote dif­fer­ently in 1954.

Prospects Now Appear So Bleak

More news to remind us of where we’re heading:

The pro­spects of saving the world’s coral reefs now appear so bleak that plans are being made to freeze samples to preserve them for the future.

A meeting in Denmark took evidence from researchers that most coral reefs will not survive even if tough reg­u­la­tions on green­house gases are put in place.

Sci­ent­ists proposed storing samples of coral species in liquid nitrogen. That will allow them to be rein­tro­duced to the seas in the future if global tem­per­at­ures can be stabilised.

Two Spirals

Wiki­pedia’s article about Spiral Island I and Spiral Island II caught my eye:

Spiral Island I was a floating arti­fi­cial island in a lagoon near Puerto Aven­turas, on the Carib­bean coast of Mexico south of Cancún. It was built by British eco-​pioneer Richart (or “Rishi”) Sowa begin­ning in 1998; he filled nets with empty dis­carded plastic bottles to support a struc­ture of plywood and bamboo, on which he poured sand and planted numerous plants, including man­groves. It was des­troyed by Hur­ricane Emily in 2005. Sowa has built a new Spiral Island II in Isla Mujeres, Mexico.

The original island sported a two-​story house, a solar oven, a self-​composting toilet, and three beaches. He used some 250,000 bottles for the 66ft (20 m) by 54 ft (16 m) struc­ture. The man­groves were planted to help keep the island cool, and some of them rose up to 15 ft (5 m) high.

Sowa is a musician, artist, and car­penter. Now in his fifties, he is an envir­on­ment­alist who believes in recyc­ling and low-​impact living.

I’d like to live on an island I made for myself out of bottles and mangroves.

I, Google

I’ve decided to say goodbye to Marvel’s Spider-​Woman iGoogle theme, repla­cing it with Birds of Prey, an iGoogle theme created by the Audubon Society. Now I’m searching the inter­webs for pretty illus­tra­tions of birds and won­dering if I shouldn’t look into becoming an ornithologist.

O, Sweet Destiny

When the lives and worlds of comic book char­ac­ters become too com­plic­ated, too wound up around them­selves, editors and writers can choose to reboot them, begin­ning all afresh, the past pushed into a parallel plane where its influ­ence and effect on the present, and the future, can either be con­trolled, con­ser­vat­ively, or elided as entirely as the murdered Nikolai Yezhov. Like water behind a dam, the old past can be let out in small quant­ities to sustain the new tranche of land, if required (William Shatner was hoping he would be carried into the new Star Trek film on a gush of Abrams’ creative waters; the gush never came); but if not required (Shatner-​Kirk was never as important as Nimoy-​Spock), that water remains behind the wall, present, but invis­ible to those on the recently reclaimed dry ground.

People can effect similar reboots, con­struct mighty dams in their life to hold back the current; but it isn’t quite as straight­for­ward in real life as it is in fiction (and anyway isn’t always all that straight­for­ward in fiction). Dams can be built, but they’re rarely as sturdy (or as opaque — there is a shortage of stone and concrete in the psyche) as the dams that check the flow of fic­tional nar­rat­ives. The waters of real nar­rat­ives, the rivers that are lives, find ways around obstacles. The rivers of the planet are sim­il­arly single-​minded, fre­quently fighting the man-​made engines of fluvial fine-​tuning and read­just­ment. Some­times this can appear whim­sical: engin­eers once tried to shorten a stretch of the Mis­sis­sippi, cutting a channel to bypass a bend in the river, only then to find the water gradu­ally, over the course of decades, heading back around the longer route, around the bend. And when all other attempts to progress down­stream fail, when it really is trapped, the water can shake the world, perhaps; from humble pro­tester, rights-​activist a ter­rorist, freedom-​fighter is born.

Our personal stories fight like rivers to flow the way they want to flow. Destiny exists in some form (possibly — I tease, a little, but only because there is a fence and I am on it), whether as an actual meta­phys­ical phe­nomenon as yet uniden­ti­fied by science or as the combined side-​effects of our per­son­ality, ambition, ima­gin­a­tion. This doesn’t neces­sarily mean we can’t choose, freely, where to go, but perhaps suggests — gently, teas­ingly suggests — that we should identify our river, its course, source, and des­tin­a­tion, before we try to navigate our raft; and if we don’t, we surely risk never arriving where we believe we are heading. Don’t look for your purpose, pilgrim, just find your road. I am cur­rently on an exped­i­tion to find the source of my Nile.

A satel­lite image of the northern portion of the Nile River captured on the 30th of January, 2001. (Source)

Our Children, and Theirs

Kim Stanley Robinson, author of, amongst other things, the acclaimed RGB Mars trilogy, has written a powerful piece for The Wash­ington Post about the reasons for con­tinuing, or not con­tinuing, to explore outer space:

So why even talk about this? It is useful to take the long view from time to time. This is what science fiction does, and though science fiction has been bad about space, it has been good about time. Taking that long view, we no longer seem like the most soph­ist­ic­ated culture ever; indeed, much that we do now will look silly or even criminal in the future. The long view also reminds us that we are a species only about 100,000 years old, evolving on a planet where the average lifetime of a species is 10 million years. Unless we blow it, humans are going to be around in 1,000 years — and if we make it that far, it’s likely that we’ll last much longer than that.

So, what actions, taken today, will help our children, and theirs, and theirs? From that per­spective, decar­bon­izing our tech­no­logy and creating a sus­tain­able civil­iz­a­tion emerge as the over­riding goals of our age. If going into space helps achieve those goals, we should go; if going into space is pre­ma­ture, or falls into the category of “a good idea if Earth is healthy,” it should be put on the science fiction shelf, where I hope our des­cend­ants will be free to choose it if they want it.

An inter­view Robinson gave to SPACE.com around nine years ago touched on similar issues:

[Inter­viewer]: Why is Mars important? Or, more gen­er­ally, is space explor­a­tion important at all, when people are still starving down here?

[Kim Stanley Robinson]: No. Mars is not important, compared to people starving down here. It’s inter­esting, but in the his­tor­ical context you bring up, inter­esting is not enough. Same with space explor­a­tion. The Only Good Excuse for our focus on Mars and space more gen­er­ally, in this moment of history, is that we can learn things out there that can help us deal with the envir­on­mental crisis unfolding here on Earth. It has to be asserted that space science is an Earth science, and that like the other Earth sciences it is needed to help us get through the next couple cen­turies with less envir­on­mental damage than oth­er­wise would occur. But having asserted that, we need to make it so; to con­figure our efforts in space and on Mars toward that end.

I think we should go, want us to go; but I also know that we have a huge amount of work to do here first, that we have immense problems to deal with on this fragile planet. I wish there was a stronger desire both to go and to fix the problems.

A painting by Chesley Bones­tell, the “Father of Modern Space Art” and “the bridge between Buck Rogers and John Glenn, between Flash Gordon and Neil Arm­strong, between ima­gin­a­tion and reality.” (Source)

There Be Circles

News of unusual hap­pen­ings on the surface of Lake Baikal:

Late in April 2009, astro­nauts aboard the Inter­na­tional Space Station observed a strange circular area of thinned ice in the southern end of Lake Baikal in southern Siberia. Siberia is remote and cold; ice cover can persist into June. The upper image, a detailed astro­naut pho­to­graph, shows a circle of thin ice (dark in color, with a diameter of about 4.4 kilo­meters); this is the focal point for ice break up in the very southern end of the lake. A sequence of MODIS images indic­ates that the feature was first visible on April 5, 2009.

Baikal con­tained another, very similar circle near the center of the lake above a sub­marine ridge that bisects the lake (ice circles are indic­ated by arrows in the lower MODIS image from April 20). Both circles are visible through April 20, 2009. Clouds cover the center of the lake until April 24, at which point the circular patch of thin ice was becoming a hole of open water. Similar circular ice patterns — although not nearly as distinct — have been doc­u­mented in the same central area of the lake in April 1994 (during the STS-​59 Shuttle mission) and in 1985 (during the STS-​51B Shuttle mission).

While the origin of the circles is unknown, the peculiar pattern suggests con­vec­tion (upwelling) in the lake’s water column. Ice cover changes rapidly at this time of year. Within a day, the ice can melt almost com­pletely and freeze again overnight. Throughout April, the circles are per­sistent: they appear when ice cover forms, and then dis­ap­pear as ice melts. The pattern and appear­ance suggest that the ice is quite thin. The features were last observed in MODIS images on April 27, 2009.

Below is the pho­to­graph taken by the astro­naut on the Inter­na­tional Space Station and a MODIS satel­lite image with the unex­plained circles (for what it’s worth, I think they’re caused by sub­merged UFOs that are attempting to start their anti-​matter drives) circled in red:

One of the strange circles that have appeared in the ice. (Source)

Sunken UFOs pre­paring to leave? (Source)

Completely Alone with Nature

Rachel Dickinson has written a short essay for The Atlantic about a trip she made to the Kamchatka Pen­in­sula, a part of the world I would dearly like to visit:

It’s easy to delude yourself into thinking you’re com­pletely alone with nature in the wild Bering Sea, but every so often, around a bend, a ghostly aban­doned Soviet-​era building rises from the cliffs. We passed a weather station high on a hillside, and a derelict fox farm, with its concrete barn and rows of col­lapsing cages that used to hold the animals, raised for their fur.

One foggy morning we went ashore. On the beach, ravens were picking at the carcass of a young gray whale. Huge ribs and jawbones were scattered every­where. As we walked on the tundra beyond the beach, I almost fell into a small circular hole, and then realized I was sur­rounded by low, hummock-​like food-​storage shelters made of whale ribs covered with sod. We had come across a hunting camp where Yupiks have been but­chering their massive catch for hundreds of years.

There is some more inform­a­tion on the Yupik people on Wiki­pedia, here. (The Wiki­pedia article on the Siberian Yupik is also worth a read.)

Sunshine and Cataclysms

Yoann Lemoine (who I found on BOOOOOOOM!, a site I should visit more often) makes images, takes pho­to­graphs, that I would love to put all over my walls. This image seems pulled from some near-​future science fiction tale (is it a utopia trans­forming into a dystopia, or vice versa?), or perhaps from a novel by J. G. Ballard (Cocaine Nights came to mind first, because I vividly recall the sunlight in that book, but Super-​Cannes , with its heat, its concrete, and its glass-​walled offices, is perhaps a better fit):

Many of Lemoine’s pho­to­graphs evoke, for me, the end of the world (or could it be the edge of the world, the fringe: world’s-end?); even the pho­to­graph on her site of the singers — a choir, I think — feels ominous, somehow. She is pho­to­graphing in the present, visu­al­ising the future; and the futures artists visu­alise are always con­di­tioned by how they inter­pret the present. I would like to know more about Lemoine, about her philo­sophy, her hopes, her fears.

This pho­to­graph cer­tainly suggests a journey towards closure, a trip to the edge of some­where, something:

And when I saw this pho­to­graph my first asso­ci­ation, strangely, was On the Beach, (a purely arbit­rary asso­ci­ation, a con­nec­tion of “sand” and “beach”, as I’ve not actually read Shute’s novel):

My second asso­ci­ation was The Quiet Earth, the opening scene of which feature (if my memory is correct) a beach, and waves. A cata­clysm has occurred, and only a few people have survived. There is heat (a very Bal­lar­dian heat, now I think about it) and loneli­ness, the nar­rative tracking a survivor’s explor­a­tion of his newly barren world. Lemoine’s pho­to­graphs do not always depict a barren world, but they do hint at approaching cataclyms.

(On the subject of films about the end of the world, Knowing, the latest film by Alex Proyas, director of the exquisite Dark City, is a mighty thing, and I can’t under­stand why it didn’t receive better reviews when it was first released. Well, I can, in a way, but still: what flaws it may have are greatly out­weighed by its ambition, its ideas. If you get the chance, watch it: it is all that good science fiction films should be, but so fre­quently are not.)