Peachy Keenum

The Crying Glacier of Arctic Norway

Something tells me that this photo is going to catch on with environmentalists.

From Daily Mail: Rising sea levels caused by melting ice caps are one of the most worrying effects of global warming and experts warn swathes of low-lying countries will be left under water.

The picture was captured by marine photographer and environmental lecturer Michael Nolan while on an annual voyage to observe the glacier and its surrounding wildlife.

A glacier expert has confirmed the ice cap carrying an image of Mother Nature 'crying' has been continually shrinking by as much as 160 feet every year for several decades.

Jon Ove Hagen, a member of the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) and professor in geosciences at Oslo University, Norway, has been studying the Austfonna ice-shelf since 1988.

Austfonna is Norway's largest ice-cap. It sits on the island of Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago.

Mr Hagen, 59, said: 'Austfonna, at over 3,000 square miles, is by far the largest ice cap in Svalbard and one of the largest in the Arctic.

Henry David Thoreau - The Climate Researcher

The New York Times has a wonderful article and slideshow on Henry David Thoreau's new distinction as a climate researcher. 

Cornelia Dean writes: Henry David Thoreau endorsed civil disobedience, opposed slavery and lived for two years in a hut in the woods here, an experience he described in “Walden.” Now he turns out to have another line in his résumé: climate researcher.

He did not realize it, of course. Thoreau died in 1862, when the industrial revolution was just beginning to pump climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In 1851, when he started recording when and where plants flowered in Concord, he was making notes for a book on the seasons.

Now, though, researchers at Boston University and Harvard are using those notes to discern patterns of plant abundance and decline in Concord — and by extension, New England — and to link those patterns to changing climate.

Their conclusions are clear. On average, common species are flowering seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day, Richard B. Primack, a conservation biologist at Boston University, and Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, then his graduate student, reported this year in the journal Ecology. Working with Charles C. Davis, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard and two of his graduate students, they determined that 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have vanished from Concord and 36 percent are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long.

(please continue the rest of this fascinating article by clicking the link I provided above)