Slashdot Mirror
South Pole to Get Highway
tetrad writes "The New Scientist magazine reports that the US is building a road to the South Pole. The "highway" would cross the Ross Ice Shelf and then pass through the Transantarctic Mountains (map here). Convoys of tractors will be the only traffic on the road, bringing fuel and heavy equipment to the South Pole, as well as enabling the installation of a $250M fibre-optic communications cable (discussed previously)."
This is about the dumbest thing I have ever seen here, and that is saying a lot. A 6-lane highway in Antarctica? Rocks? Pavement? Paint? Good grief.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Please note before you read this that I am not an environmental nut nor does this comment mean that I am a anti-global warming activist, I am merely a scientist (an engineer more specifically) making an observation.
If the average temperature of the world increased by 1.5 C over a period of time on the order of 10 years I would be freaking scared. The world is extremely fragile in many ways (although quite durable in many others). However, on the grand scale of things if our entire system were to drastically change its temperature like that over such a short period of time, the world would be in chaos (the environment, etc). Imagine if that instead of having a temperature everyday of 98.6 F (37 C) that you had a temperature of 101.3 F everyday (38.5 C)... You would not be a happy camper. Moreover, you would probably die after, at most, a couple months of that.
A 1.5 C change IS a big deal and I wanted to make sure that you don't go throwing around 'negligible' numbers that freakishly large anymore...