Perhaps I’d better wait a while before buying that beach house
- Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.
- Tom Osterkamp is a professor of physics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Since the mid-1970s, he's measured permafrost temperatures through small holes drilled at sites across the state. He says permafrost is melting throughout the Arctic.
- In Ellesmere Island, Canada, a combination of warmer temperatures and sunny days has triggered an increasing frequency of detachment events, or landslides, over the past 25 years, compared with the previous 75, according to Antoni Lewkowicz, professor of geography at the University of Ottawa.
- Of the 244 marine glaciers that drain inland ice on the Antarctic peninsula, a region previously identified as vulnerable to global warming, 87 percent have fallen back over the last half century, according to research by British experts.
Not that there's any global warming, of course, but it would be unfortunate if these environmental coincidences put half a million dollars of my real estate under 6 meters of seawater. Perhaps I should just stockpile sand, so if the waterlevel converts Westmoreland and Brooklyn into an island I'll be able to set up a little beach east of my house.
(Item #1 is via Hellblazer, the rest are from web searches)