Author Archives: RickBarrier

Antarctica’s glaciers are melting so fast, you can swim in them. In a Speedo.

Even as someone who spends most of her time thinking about climate change, it’s easy for me to forget about the looming danger of changes happening at the bottom of the earth. But Lewis Pugh, a British endurance swimmer and ocean advocate, doesn’t want anyone to forget about the melting glaciers of Antarctica, and to get our attention, he decided to go for a swim.

On January 23, Pugh, who’s 50, became the first person to swim in one of the supraglacial lakes of East Antarctica. These are lakes and rivers that form on the surface of thick glacial ice as it melts from above. A study of supraglacial lakes in Antarctica published last fall found more than 65,000 of them at the peak of the summer melt season in January 2017. Most of the lakes were spotted on the ice shelf, the part of the glacier that hangs over the ocean and is not grounded on the seafloor, making it more vulnerable to calving (i.e., falling off).

In nothing but a swim cap and a Speedo, Pugh dove into water that was just above 32 degrees F and swam for 10 minutes. As he navigated the channel, a chunk of ice cracked and sent an ominous “boom” through the water.

“I swam here today as we are in a climate emergency. We need immediate action from all nations to protect our planet,” Pugh told the BBC. The stunt was part of a larger campaign to create a marine protected area in East Antarctica.

Kelvin Trautman

Kelvin Trautman

Kelvin Trautman

Pugh’s icy swim wasn’t the only first near the South Pole this month. Across the continent, in West Antarctica, scientists deployed at the Thwaites Glacier made the first observations of a pool of warm water melting the ice from below. Scientists drilled through the ice right near the “grounding zone,” the boundary between the part of the glacier that’s resting on the seafloor and the part of it that extends over the open ocean, forming a shelf. They measured temperatures below the ice of more than 2 degrees F above the freezing point of the seawater.

“The fact that such warm water was just now recorded by our team along a section of Thwaites grounding zone where we have known the glacier is melting suggests that it may be undergoing an unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea-level rise,” said David Holland, director of New York University’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in a press release.

The Thwaites Glacier, which is about the size of Florida, holds the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet together. The collapse of Thwaites alone could lead to about 3 feet of sea-level rise. If you, like me, don’t think about melting glaciers nearly enough, here’s a helpful tool from NOAA that will help you visualize what your neighborhood will look like if that happens.

In addition to the temperature measurement, scientists also sent a camera down to the grounding zone for the first time and captured footage of the ice melting from beneath. “There are a few places where you can see streams of particles coming off the glaciers, textures and particles that tell us it’s melting pretty quickly and irregularly,” Britney Schmidt, a glaciologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told the Atlantic.

Antarctica’s glaciers are melting from above and below, like a Popsicle that you just can’t lick fast enough to keep under control.

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Antarctica’s glaciers are melting so fast, you can swim in them. In a Speedo.

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Rubio Slams Trump for Hiring Foreigners, but His Own Record Could Bring Trouble

Mother Jones

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Last week’s Republican presidential debate had just begun when Marco Rubio launched into his first of many broadsides against front-runner Donald Trump for the hiring practices in his real estate empire. “Even today,” the senator from Florida said, “we saw a report in one of the newspapers that Donald, you’ve hired a significant number of people from other countries to take jobs that Americans could have filled.” He repeated the attack again on the eve of Super Tuesday this week, saying at a rally in Atlanta that Trump had recently hired foreign workers in Florida. “I know Americans are qualified to do those jobs, because those are the jobs my parents did, working in a hotel,” Rubio said.

The critique didn’t appear to have much of an effect: Trump dominated the primaries and caucuses on Tuesday, winning seven states while Rubio came away with just one. And Rubio might want to think twice before employing that line of attack again, since he’s as vulnerable to it as anyone.

It’s not that Rubio has staffed his Senate office with cheap foreign labor. (As Trump retorted during the debate last week, “I’ve hired tens of thousands of people over at my job. You’ve hired nobody.”) But Rubio has been unwavering in his support for guest worker visas that some companies exploit to replace American workers with foreign ones. As Rubio continues to hammer Trump for hiring foreign workers to do jobs that Americans can do, he is actually highlighting one of his own weaknesses as he faces the populist, nationalist frenzy that Trump has whipped up.

Rubio’s work on the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” immigration bill in 2013 has been a stumbling block throughout his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination because of his support for the bill’s path to citizenship or, as the right wing calls it, “amnesty.” Less discussed is the fact that Rubio led the charge to expand a business-friendly guest worker visa program known as H-1B. He even brought in an old friend who was a partner at a corporate immigration firm—and whose clients stood to benefit from the guest worker program—to lead his office’s work on the bill.

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Rubio Slams Trump for Hiring Foreigners, but His Own Record Could Bring Trouble

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Rubio Slams Trump for Hiring Foreigners, but His Own Record Could Bring Trouble