4TheRcrd Mag.

Could you be impressed by the most important photograph of this month? I read an interesting article at Checkerspot magazine a few days ago. It was about climate change and the breaking of some pretty hefty north-pole ice-caps. And I thought, hmmm, what’s it got to do with Vancouver, and then I figured: Well, we care about this jazz. Not only for reasons like: we’re hip and global climate change is a hip new topic, which are evidently enough to write about it here on BR, in these articles (1, 2, 3, …); but also because we have a huge contingency of people who know what’s up in the world, and who are seriously worried about it.

I think it would delight our readers to pose another occasion to discuss this and share news with each other. Anything relevant to this vast topic of climate change, cuz it’s bloody huge and, well, very necessary to keep in the limelight.

To start off some disco, then, I found a bunch of handy facts that those who won’t have time to read the article will find fascinating:

(1) The size of this ice-cap was huge: “Slightly bigger than the island of Manhattan, the shelf was large enough to contain a hundred or so icebergs, and was iceberg-like itself in that most of its 40-metre-thick mass existed below water.”
(2) This break-off was reported to be one of the largest photographed climate changes in history: “virtually the entire shelf–amass spanning 87 square kilometres — broke away from the shore.When the breakup was first reported in the waning days of 2006, Ayles, now widely deemed one of the latest sentinels of global change, achieved global infamy.”

other shockers include things like:

(3) this month, the High Arctic is standing at a whopping 2-3 degrees Celcius, remarkably warm considering there is nothing but miles and miles of ice the size of highrises.

(4) every decade the arctic temperatures rise about 0.4 degrees Celsius: “All this took place against the backdrop of a general Arctic warming to the tune of 0.4°C per decade since 1966…”
(5) “Now, searching the Internet, Copland has yet to find a news source in any language in any country that hasn’t picked up on Ayles — Japan, Mauritius, Russia, India…. “It’s absolutely huge in South America.” The MODIS shots,meanwhile, appear all over the web, from Copland’s own home page to CNN. They’ve been converted into a film by NASA animators and will appear in a BBC documentary.”

What’ch’y'all think? Comments, Other readings, Thoughts?

Photo Credit: LandVike’s photostream