Haven’t I read this sci-fi classic?
This melt water was pouring through to the bottom of the glacier creating a lake 500 metres deep which was causing the glacier “to float on land.” Calling Peter Jackson! Al Gore on the white courtesy phone!!! These melt-water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like applying oil to a surface and causing it to slide into the sea. It’s sort of like if we pushed CA into the sea. It is causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic.”The glacier is now moving at 15km a year into the sea although in surges it moves even faster. He measured one surge at 5km in 90 minutes - an extraordinary event. Surge, Bitches!
Veli Kallio, a Finnish scientist, said the quakes were triggered because ice had broken away after being fused to the rock for hundreds of years. The quakes were not vast - on a magnitude of 1 to 3 - but had never happened before in north-west Greenland and showed potential for the entire ice sheet to collapse.
Dr Corell said: “These earthquakes are not dangerous in themselves but the fact that they are happening shows that events are happening far faster than we ever anticipated.”
I wonder if that would work, if they made a few “Al Gore: Beyond Thunderdome” type movies to catch people’s attention. I have this phobia of really large things like icebergs, and it gives me the shudders to imagine the glaciers of Greenland cracking apart and sliding into the sea in huge chunks. 7 meters is what they’re predicting it changes the sea level. I also read somewhere that when it falls in, it’ll create some kind of huge storm, like a north waters superhurricane.
Anyway, just thought I’d frame some sobering environmental news in a more exciting way this morning. There are some fun sci fi books about this sort of thing, if I’ve time I’ll come back and drops some links later.
Front page
Well, look, only cities near the ocean are in any real danger
and they all vote Blue, and they’re full of gays and niggers and Jews and liberals, so is there a down side here? I don’t see it, and anyhow, it’s all part of The Plan.
My gated community is way up high in the Clear Air, so fuck you.
Well, we might lose the state of Florida, but you can’t make an omelette…
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
It’s the second installment in an epic of Mars colonization (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars), where the drive to colonize Mars is accelerated by this happening at both poles on earth.
Not surprisingly, in the novel the corporatists and christianists form an alliance to take over 22nd century Mars, which until that point had basically been the abode of a bunch of neo-socialist bohemian interdisciplinary scientists, geeks, academics, and free spirits. Where have I heard this before? Sounds like cyberspace to me…
The Christian Corporatists end up about as successful on Mars as they are in Iraq, and finally the Rasta/ Muslim/ Technocrat Martians have to re-Terraform both planets, but they aren’t really successful on earth until some major Soros-type corporatists throw their weight in behind them too.
This kind of sci-fi has really influenced by thinking. Whenever you open up essentially a new frontier where people don’t have to seriously compete with each other, but open up new vistas for co-operative improvement, things get better. Look at cybersace in the 90s. Whatever happens here afterwards, there was an incredible increase in consciousness among millions of Americans facilitated by the internet.
I am convinced this is one of the reason the D.o’D has an iron control of aerospace technologies and wants an iron control of cyberspace. Once people get away from the old world in a self-sustaining way, they are by definition off the grid. New ways and ideas evolve, and though a lot of new things won’t work, the ones that do change history forever.
Reality keeps upsetting the best efforts of corporate dominionism.
You start getting sea level rises of a meter a year, and you’ll start seeing some changes alright. By that point, all the gates on their communities will do no good. No glaciers means no fresh drinking water for all those mid-level wealthy yuppie communities, which is why the real extremely wealthy have been buying up all those aquifiers.
You think the Middle East is a mess? Once the sea levels start to rise, and the drinking water starts to go, somebody’s going to realize exactly how valuable the Great Lakes are. I keep hoping to be off the planet by that time, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen on this timeline in the multiverse.
No Hell below us
Above us, only sky