Global Warming Exposes New Islands in the Arctic

circletimessquare writes "The New York Times has a sobering article about the rapidly accelerating pace of glacial melting across the arctic, focusing on the discovery of new islands and the fact that this is occurring far faster than climate scientist's models predict. What were called Nunataks or 'lonely mountains' in Inuit, trapped in the ice, only a few years ago, are now in the open ocean by kilometers. Off of Greenland, what was known previously as peninsulas have been revealed to be islands as the ice retreats. Dennis Schmitt, a modern day explorer and discoverer of one of these new islands and fluent in Inuit, has named it Uunartoq Qeqertoq: the warming island."

Comments

Re:Well, it is named Greenland isn't it?

[jesterpilot]

If you RTFWA, you'd prabably noticed Erik the Red called it 'Greenland' for the same reason Vista is called "The most secure OS in existance'.

Re:Islands

[Daddy_was_a_donkey]

I don't get why the "man has no effect" crowd are so vehemently against taking any action. If we assume man has no effect and global warming is a natural phenomenon, what's so wrong with taking steps to (a) reduce pollution and (b) reduce dependency on fossil fuels?

(a) Pollution does f*cked up things quite apart from global warming. Remember those picture of forest in Germany and Sweden, algae blooms, "clean" rivers and streams etc etc, so what's wrong with trying to reduce it?

(b) Why would anyone want to be so dependant on another countries resource? The oil is finite, it's going to run out, this is a bad thing. Developing new tech and their associated industries, this is a good thing. What's the problem?

Look, if it helps all the naysayers, claim you're being patriotic, claim that you want to wean your country off the petrochemical teat, claim that you want to save you glorious forests and lakes for "the kids". You don't have to say you're doing it because you've changed your mind about global warming, you just have to do it.