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Impassable Northwest Passage Open For First Time In History
An anonymous reader writes "The Northwest Passage, a normally ice-locked shortcut between Europe and Asia, is now passable for the first time in recorded history reports the European Space Agency. Leif Toudal Pedersen from the Danish National Space Centre said in the article: 'We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million sq km which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100 000 sq km per year on average, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is extreme.'"
That posting is the interesting, I useful fact to carry around.
I'm still a global warming sceptic. I'm all for reducing carbon emissions and the like. I'm just not totally convinved the weather patterns and carbon emissions are intertwined as some of the figures look.
Correlation is not causation.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
So yes it looks similar on Google maps, but it looks completely different on Google Earth.
Try Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion map for an interesting view of the world...
This guy's the limit!
This is so wrong I don't know where to begin.
Polar bears have historically required pack ice to breed and hunt. As the ice melts more and more bears drown. Their numbers are in decline. Officially they're listed as vulnerable, but I believe later this year that status will be downgraded to endangered. Hopefully they'll be able to adapt their behavior to the new, warmer conditions of the arctic. But I wouldn't expect that.
There's plenty of scientific research on this subject. Granted, Wikipedia isn't the best reference. But it will give you pointers to look further: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bear
Nobody claimed that Amundsen has not done it back then. The claim is that the passage now is practicable in one go, because the whole passage is open. Amundsen needed several years to make it all the way through in bits and pieces. And he couldn't have done it in any larger ship than the one he used, due to the water water being as shallow as 3 feet. Not exactly an economically viable solution.
Linux user since early January 1992.
You are jesting, surely.
If you had any idea about the condition of the merchant ships and the way their crews are hired, you would have never said that.
Deep sea marine merchant fleets are governed by something which can only be described as a "law of the jungle", where the disposable crews (literally! I heard stories of men simply dumped in the next harbour, regardless of location, after losing arms or legs in accidents on the ship, without any concern about their means of medical care or transportation. Insurance? You gotta be kidding!) and rust-covered ships worked until they literally fall apart at sea, after which the owner simply collects more then their value, having shrewdly adjusted the insurance payout in anticipation. Any attempts at regulation usually result in the owners re-registering all of their ships in places in which bribery, corruption and non-existant regulation make up for an "ideal" merchant shipping home port. What did you think the words "flag of convenience" mean? Ever notice that all of those ships in the news which broke up on some rocks are flying weird flags from strange places, even though they are clearly owned by western conglomerates?
Adding nuclear power to this mix would be truly suicidal.
Consider another glacier - a really big one with a lot of ice behind it and a large height difference and/or steep slopes. Something like this moves faster. When it gets warmer it will move faster again. These are the glaciers that are advancing.
Unfortuantely we have people that really just want to win an argument that just take the amount of advance and retreat of a lot of glaciers and average it without considering why. They are completely ignoring the temperature measurements in those locations since they are pretending to use a glacier as a thermometer instead of the real thermometers that may actually be there.
As for the warm is good argument - I recommend talking to a farmer. Whether it is a El Nino or La Nina effect in the Pacific in a paticular year is enough to drive farmers backrupt off the land in some areas - they know about warm weather in the wrong spot.
Well, Ben, there's nothing that rises to the level of courtroom proof in the way of evidence excavated yet no, but the concept is not exactly new.
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Basically, the Haida band, who are the indigenous First Nation of Haida Gwaii (the archipelago which you non-PC foreigners are probably more familar with as "the Queen Charlotte Islands") display such a number of cultural similarities to the Norsemen that many reasonable people find it less of a stretch to presume that there was contact between them than to assume a remarkable cascade of coincidences. Let us take an example, boat design.
""Yakutat," or "Northern-style" canoes include a variety of design forms, including a characteristic curve and swelling near the bow. The prow of the canoe gracefully curves up from the water and can be adorned by elaborate carvings."
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/treasure_fossil/Treasures/Haida_Canoe/canoe.gif
Now, contrary to the learned discourse above, these are not actually characteristic of Haida design. There is one other culture that designed its ocean-going vessels with those same "characteristic" traits. Care to guess what that culture was?
http://www.geocities.com/dragar.geo/WSP/Pix/longship.gif
Those are just the first two images Google search came up with for each; if you look into it further, you'll find that the similarities are more striking than those two make apparent. Striking enough that when Haida/Tlingit take their canoes on cultural exchanges to Europe, they constantly get questions along the lines of "why did you make a longship out of a single tree trunk and paint it funny?", as Europeans just assume that the design is a conscious imitation of the Norse, not their own.
Also, the Haida are physiologically distinct, rather dramatically so in fact, from every other American aboriginal culture; they are taller, whiter, grow facial hair, and produce significant quantities of brunettes and redheads.
"Marchand also described the Haidas of Queen Charlotte Islands whom he visited in 1791. He found them not differing materially in stature from Europeans, better proportioned and better formed than the Sitkans and without the gloomy and wild look of the latter. Their color he found did not differ from that of Frenchmen, and several were less swarthy "than the inhabitants of our country places' (Edward L. Keithahn, MONUMENTS IN CEDAR: The Authentic Story of the Totem Pole, Bonanza books, New York 1971:19-23, emphases supplied)."
This is not consistent with Haida mixing with Asian genetic pools, or any other Western North American genetic pool, or hell any other race bordering the entire Pacific for that matter. On the other hand, this is remarkably suggestive of significant admixture with a Scandinavian genetic pool, yes?
Anyhoo, if you'd like to look further into the theory that the "Vinland" of the sagas is actually British Columbia, specifically the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island, here's a page for you:
http://www.spirasolaris.ca/sbb4g1ev.html
Actually living in British Columbia, I can attest to the plausibility of all the little details. The one that really struck me was his identification of the Oregon grape with the always-problematic 'grapes' of the sagas. As pointed out on this page, the presentation in the sagas does seem facially invalid:
"As for the grapes in the Sagas, James Robert Enterline wrote in VIKING AMERICA (1972):
In the Saga of Eirik the Red, after Thorhall the Hunter went off by himself, some writers have inferred that he found grapes and ate of them, becoming intoxicated, for he was discovered on a steep crag where:" he lay gazing up into the air with wide-open mouth and nostrils, scratching and pincing himself and muttering something
The corresp
Not in any great hurry ; in theory, the opening of the Arctic Ocean could make development and/ or extraction of minerals somewhat cheaper in the immediate coastal regions. But once you're more than a few tens of miles from the coast, then you're going to find that the costs of building rail lines or pipelines (depending on if you're talking about minerals or oil) gets up to the level where it's just as cheap in the long run to go overland with rail. And that's not going to be a quick option. Then again, building port facilities isn't quick either, particularly if you've got no port to bring the building materials for building your port.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"