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Science Says You Can Split Infinitives and Use the Passive Voice

by StarLujannsuakf Posted on October 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Leave it to a scientist to finally explain how to kill off bad writing.

In his new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, Steven Pinker basically outdoes Strunk and White. The celebrated Harvard cognitive scientist and psycholinguist explains how to write in clear, “classic” prose that shares valuable information with clarity but never condescension. And he tells us why so many of the tut-tutting grammar “rules” that we all think we’re supposed to follow—don’t split infinitives, don’t use the passive voice, don’t end a sentence with a preposition—are just nonsense.

“There are so many bogus rules in circulation that kind of serve as a tactic for one-upmanship,” explains Pinker on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “They’re a way in which one person can prove that they’re more sophisticated or literate than someone else, and so they brandish these pseudo-rules.”

Unlike past sages of style, Pinker approaches grammar from a scientific perspective, as a linguist. And that’s what leads him to the unavoidable conclusion that language is never set in stone; rather, it is a tool that is constantly evolving and changing, continually adding new words and undoing old rules and assumptions. “When it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum,” writes Pinker in The Sense of Style.

Steven Pinker. Rebecca Goldstein.

Indeed, Pinker notes with amusement in the book that in every era, there is always somebody complaining about how all the uncouth speakers of the day are wrecking the Queen’s English. It’s basically the linguistic equivalent of telling the kids to get off your lawn. Why does this happen? “As a language changes from beneath our feet, we feel the sands shifting and always think that it’s a deterioration,” explains Pinker on the podcast. “Whereas, everything that’s in the language was an innovation at some point in the history of English. If you’re living through the transition, it feels like a deterioration even though it’s just a change.”

Thus, Pinker notes that in their classic book, The Elements of Style, published in the mid-20th century, Strunk and White instructed writers not to use the verb “to contact.” Look how that turned out for them.

The same framework allows Pinker to explain why so many grammatical “rules” that we all think we have to follow are, in fact, bogus. His outlook is refreshingly anti-authoritarian: You don’t have to follow supposed grammar rules, he says, unless there is actually a good reason for following them.

Here, then, is a brief but highly liberating list of glorious rule-breaking activities that Pinker says you should feel free to engage in:

Do split infinitives. For Pinker, the idea that you cannot split infinitives—for example, the classic complaint that Star Trek was wrong to describe the Starship Enterprise’s mission as “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly” or “boldly to go”—is “the quintessential bogus rule.”

“No good writer in English has ever followed it consistently, if you do follow it it makes your prose much worse,” Pinker explained on Inquiring Minds.

Indeed, according to Pinker, this is a rather striking case in which the alleged prohibition seems to be mostly perpetuated by urban legend or word of mouth. It doesn’t even seem to be seriously asserted as a rule by any supposed style experts. “This rule kind of levitates in mid-air, there’s actually no support even from the style manuals,” adds Pinker.

Do use the passive voice (at the right times). We are constantly told that we need to make our verbs active, rather than relying on passive constructions. The passive, Pinker emphasizes, is a voice and not a tense: “It’s the difference between ‘the man bit the dog’ and ‘the dog was bitten by the man,'” he explains. (The latter example is passive.) In this particular example, you really don’t want to use the passive voice; but according to Pinker, there are other contexts in which you very well might. “Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader’s attention and memory,” he writes.

One of the uses defended by Pinker involves employing the passive voice to “direct the reader’s gaze.” For instance, sometimes you don’t need to know the name of the person who committed an action, because what really matters—what you, the writer, want to emphasize—is the action. Do we really need to know that “the cook cooked a perfect steak,” or can we leave out the actor here since all we really hope to communicate is that “the steak was perfectly cooked”? Pinker has no problem with the latter construction, assuming that you’re trying to focus attention on the steak rather than who cooked it.

Do begin sentences with conjunctions. Pinker also says there’s absolutely nothing wrong with starting a sentence with “and,” “but,” “or,” “also,” “so,” or even “because.” The idea that this is an offense gets taught early on to kids, Pinker observes, as a way of preventing them from using sentence fragments.

But “whatever the pedagogical merits may be of feeding children misinformation, it is inappropriate for adults,” writes Pinker. These conjunctions (Pinker calls them “coordinators”) “are among the commonest coherence markers, and they may be used to begin a sentence whenever the clauses being connected are too long or complicated to fit comfortably into a single megasentence.” Fragments can be an art. Run-ons a headache. And once again, you don’t have to follow grammar “rules” when those rules have no actual justification.

Do end a sentence with a preposition. And there’s another activity that writers are often told not to engage in. And that is ending a sentence with a preposition (see last sentence). Pinker couldn’t be more scornful: “The prohibition against clause-final prepositions is considered a superstition even by the language mavens, and it persists only among know-it-alls who have never opened a dictionary or style manual to check.”

Seriously: If rigidly followed, Pinker notes, this rule would have you doing silly things like turning “What are you looking at?” into “At what are you looking?” Obviously, the former is highly preferable. There are certainly times when you don’t want a preposition at the end of a sentence—usually when you are discussing something serious, and ending with a preposition would make your tone seem too light—but you’ve got to figure this out on a case-by-case basis.

And yes, you can even use the singular “they/their/them.” Pinker even argues that you can use the following construction: “No American should be discriminated against because of the color of their skin.” Language Nazis would argue here that since “American” is singular, using the plural “their” is a big faux pas. But Pinker counters that Shakespeare used these “singular they” type constructions on multiple occasions, as did Jane Austen. (Merriam Webster cites the following example from Austen: “I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly.”) “It’s been in the language for a long time, and one can even argue that it isn’t really a clash of number agreement,” says Pinker. He continues:

The ‘they’ in those constructions—”everyone return to their seats”—is actually not really a pronoun. It’s more like what a logician would call a variable. What does “everyone return to their seats” mean? It means, “for all X, X return to X’s seat.” And the “they” is just basically “X.” And so it’s not surprising that that construction is so tempting.

And there are many, many other pseudo-rules exploded in Pinker’s new book. So many that we decided to ask our own Mother Jones copy editor, Ian Gordon, to comment on this article. Pinker remarks on the podcast that an overactive copy editor is what finally pushed him into writing this book, but we’re proud to say Gordon was more enlightened, commenting:

I think Pinker is totally right. Many rules are stupid, especially the ones he highlights. We should understand the language deeply, not follow dumb rules blindly. That said, there’s something to be said about linguistic continuity across a publication, which is part of the reason why crotchety copy editors (hi!) have jobs.

The basic outlook on language and writing from all this? You don’t have to follow grammar “rules” if they don’t make any sense. Some of them just don’t stand up at all; others, meanwhile, are better understood as general guidelines, admitting of many important exceptions.

“It’s very easy to overstate rules,” says Pinker. “And if you don’t explain what the basis is behind the rule, you’re going to botch the statement of the rule—and give bad advice.”

To listen to the full Inquiring Minds interview with Steven Pinker, you can stream below:

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Science Says You Can Split Infinitives and Use the Passive Voice

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Social Conservatives Are Freaking Out Because the GOP Let 2 Gay People Into the Party

by DorthySilver Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

The Republican Party is slowly beginning to accept the existence of gay people among its ranks. As I wrote last month, there are two openly gay GOP candidates running for the US House this year—both with the support and financial backing of the national party (a third prominent openly gay candidate lost in a primary). But the social-conservative groups that have long held sway over the party aren’t taking the change lightly.

Late last week, three anti-gay-rights groups—the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the Family Research Council (FRC), and CitizenLink—sent a letter to national Republican leaders declaring their intention to actively oppose openly gay Republican House candidates Carl DeMaio and Richard Tisei, as well as Oregon Senate candidate Monica Wehby, who has endorsed gay marriage. “This decision was reached,” the groups wrote, “only after having exhausted all attempts to convince the Republican leadership of the grave error it was making in advancing candidates who do not hold core Republican beliefs and, in fact, are working to actively alienate the Republican base.”

The groups sent the letter to John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and the leaders of the Senate and House election committees, claiming DeMaio, Tisei, and Wehby are “terrible role models for young people.” The organizations not only criticized the official Republican apparatus from supporting such candidates, but also vowed to launch a “concerted effort” to encourage people to vote against them.

Tisei is firing back. “I think that the majority of people at this point look at organizations like that as going backwards rather than forwards,” he said in an interview with Mother Jones. “I think DeMaio and myself represent the threat that we’re people who will be able to move the debate forward and help change the Republican Party. That scares a lot of those groups that are in existence primarily to hold people back.”

Tisei says that he hasn’t heard anything from the national groups regarding the letter from NOM and FRC, but isn’t concerned that the party would retract its support just because social-conservative groups are in a tizzy. “I think most party leaders recognize that the majority of younger Republicans have a different opinion and eventually the party needs to move in the right direction,” he says.

The Republican Party is still walking a narrow line when it comes to LGBT issues. The leaders of the party recognize that opposition to same-sex marriage is often a nonstarter among the young voters they need to win back, but the party still needs the religiously conservative voters that haven’t come around on marriage equality. Party leaders seem perfectly willing to accept a few gay candidates. But they won’t allow any meaningful consideration of ways the law could change to improve life for LGBT folks.

For a Republican running in a blue state like Tisei in Massachusetts, critiques from the far-right may prove more useful than detrimental; it gives him an opportunity to present himself as a middle-of-the-road, moderate candidate, attacked from all sides. “As a gay Republican, you’re under siege from both the left and the right, cause you’re a threat to both,” he says. “The left wants to keep things exactly the way they are for political reasons—they want their voting bloc to not be dissipating, they don’t want to have two parties who are good on the issue. Those on the far right don’t want to see the Republican Party change at all.”

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Social Conservatives Are Freaking Out Because the GOP Let 2 Gay People Into the Party

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Can the Ultimate Clintonite Still Cut it in Bubba’s Home Base?

by AlissaVigna Posted on September 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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James Lee Witt, candidate for Congress in Arkansas’ fourth district, wipes away a fresh gob of tobacco spit with his brown cowboy boots and tells me about his old friend Bill.

“He was down here re-dedicating the Greers Ferry dam…and he called me after that, because my wife had passed away you know, and he…visited with me for a little while,” Witt says, recalling a recent conversation with the 43rd president, as we wait for the start of a parade in Arkadelphia. “I said, ‘I need to tell you something,’ and he said ‘What’s that'” I said, ‘I think I’m gonna run for Congress in the Fourth District.’ And he said”—here Witt breaks into his finest Clinton impression—'”James Lee, I think that’s a great idea!'”

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Can the Ultimate Clintonite Still Cut it in Bubba’s Home Base?

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Naomi Klein: Fossil Fuels Threaten Our Ability to Have Healthy Children

by WinnieBachman Posted on September 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s self-evident that embryos, fetuses, and babies are vulnerable. We have strict laws protecting children because they cannot fend for themselves. And yet, too often, we ignore the impact that environmental disasters have on the very earliest stages of life. In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein examines the effect that our reliance on fossil fuels has on the most helpless members of the animal kingdom—as well as on our own children.

“In species after species, climate change is creating pressures that are depriving life-forms of their most essential survival tool: the ability to create new life and carry on their genetic lines,” Klein writes. “Instead, the spark of life is being extinguished, snuffed out in its earliest, most fragile days: in the egg, in the embryo, in the nest, in the den.”

Take the case of the leatherback sea turtles. These ancient creatures have been around for 150 million years, making them the longest-surviving marine animals on earth. As Klein points out, they’ve survived the “asteroid attacks” that likely wiped out the dinosaurs. But now they are threatened by a combination of poaching, fishing and climate change. One recent study found that as temperatures rise over the next century, “egg and hatchling survival will rapidly decline” for sea turtle populations in the Eastern Pacific.

The leatherback turtles have “survived so much,” says Klein on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “But it’s not clear that they’re going to be able to survive even incremental climate change, because what’s happening already is that when the eggs are buried in the sand, even if the sand is just marginally hotter than it used to be, that the eggs are not hatching; they’re cooking in the sand.” What’s more, turtles don’t have sex chromosomes—they turn into males or females based on the ambient temperature of the sand in which they are born. Hotter sand means more female turtles hatch. And the danger is that warming could eventually result in a significant imbalance between males and females, ultimately decimating the species.

While writing the book, Klein was going through her own fertility crisis, so she says she was particularly attuned to the fragility of new life and the impacts that stressors can have on reproduction. And she began to notice a common theme in the after-effects of environmental catastrophes. In the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill, for example, she toured the Louisiana marshes. With Jonathan Henderson, an organizer with the Gulf Restoration Network, guiding the way, Klein and a few others set out to investigate whether the oil from the Deepwater Horizon had permeated the bayous. It was the fish jumping in dirty water and the coating of reddish brown oil that impressed Klein and her companions.

But what most concerned Henderson, recalls Klein, was the nearly invisible cost of the disaster: the tiny zooplankton and juveniles that grow into the shrimp, oysters, crabs, and fish that are the bedrock of the Gulf fisheries. “What he was preoccupied with was the fact that this was spawning seasoning,” says Klein. “And that even though we couldn’t see it, there was just a huge amount of proto-life surrounding us, and this was spring in the Gulf and everything was spawning.”

Drifting in the marshlands, Klein writes that she “had the distinct feeling that we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage.”

These effects, she argues, may be felt years later, when those juveniles should be reaching maturity. “Looking into it in the context of the Gulf, we’ve heard a lot of really concerning stories directly from fishermen saying that they’re not seeing baby fish out there,” says Klein. “Or they’re seeing female crabs without eggs.” In her book, she recounts a 2012 interview with a Florida fisherman named Donny Waters who had noticed the absence of small fish in his catches. This hadn’t yet cut into his income, since small fish are thrown back. But Waters was worried that the impact would be felt in the years to come—specifically, in 2016 or 2017 when those fish that were in the larval stage during the spill would have grown up.

This wouldn’t be the first time that an oil spill had a delayed effect on the fishing industry. “The greatest and most lasting impacts on the fish in Alaska had to do with this delayed disaster,” says Klein, referring to the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. “It wasn’t until three or four years after the spill that the herring fishery collapsed.” Twenty-five years later, it still hasn’t recovered.

What’s more, scientists say the spill might also help explain the deaths of an unusual number of young bottlenose dolphins in the northern Gulf of Mexico. In a paper published in PlosONE in 2012, Ruth Carmichael and her colleagues examined whether the spill contributed to a “perfect storm” of events that killed 186 dolphins—46 percent of whom were perinatal calves (that is, babies)—in the first four months of 2011.

An unusually high number of young bottlenose dolphins died in the Gulf of Mexico between January and April 2011. Graham Worthy/University of Central Florida

“When we put the pieces together,” explained Carmichael in a 2012 press release, “it appears that the dolphins were likely weakened by depleted food resources, bacteria, or other factors as a result of the 2010 cold winter or oil spill, which made them susceptible to assault by the high volumes of cold freshwater from heavy snowmelt coming from land in 2011 and resulted in distinct patterns in when and where they washed ashore.”

By April 2014, 235 stranded baby bottlenose dolphins had been found, “a staggering figure, since scientists estimate that the number of cetacean corpses found on or near shore represents only 2 percent of the ‘true death toll,'” Klein writes.

Of course, this research isn’t conclusive. A BP spokesperson notes that dolphins in the Gulf began dying off before the oil spill and that unusual mortality events “occur with some regularity.” For its part, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that the “direct or indirect effects” of the spill are being “investigated as potential causes or contributing factors for some of the strandings” but that “no definitive cause has yet been identified.”

Dolphin strandings by age group for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and western Florida. Reprinted with permission from Carmichael et al., PlosONE, 2012.

Further up the food chain, Klein is also concerned about the potential impact of environmental pollution on human fertility. During the same trip that took her through the marshlands of Louisiana, she also visited Mossville, the historic African-American town notorious as a case study in environmental racism.

“This was a town formed by freed slaves, and after being established, it was surrounded by 14 massive petrochemical factories, and the land and water was just poisoned, and most of the people have already left,” says Klein.

While worries about cancers and other illnesses in Mossville have been covered fairly extensively in the media, the issue of fertility problems is less well known. “When I spoke to women who had lived in Mossville, what I heard about was just an epidemic of infertility and that just so many women had hysterectomies,” Klein says. These stories are anecdotal, but Klein hopes more research will be done. “This is often just an understudied part of science,” she says.

Klein also points to emerging research that links the fracking boom with various reproductive problems. In a Bloomberg View column earlier this year, Mark Whitehouse reported on data presented at the annual American Economic Association meeting from a yet-to-be published study of Pennsylvania birth records that apparently found a correlation between proximity to shale gas sites and low birth weight in babies. Babies born within a 2.5-kilometer radius of gas drilling sites were almost twice as likely to have a low birth weight (increasing from 5.6 percent to 9 percent of births) or a low APGAR score, the first evaluation of a baby’s health after birth. And a study published this year examining birth outcomes and proximity to natural gas development reported that mothers who lived within 10 miles of the highest number of fracking sites (125 wells within a 10-mile radius) were 30 percent more likely to have babies with congenital heart defects and twice as likely to have babies with neurological problems compared to mothers whose homes were at least 10 miles away from any fracking site.

Then there’s the threat that climate change itself poses to children. Last year, UNICEF warned that “more severe and more frequent natural disasters, food crises and changing rainfall patterns are all threatening children’s lives” and that by 2050, climate change could result in an additional 25 million children suffering from malnourishment.

“For all the talk about the right to life and the rights of the unborn,” writes Klein, “our culture pays precious little attention to the particular vulnerabilities of children, let alone developing life.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Naomi Klein: Fossil Fuels Threaten Our Ability to Have Healthy Children

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This Poet From a Tiny Island Nation Just Shamed The World’s Leaders

by BufordWillshire Posted on September 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Presidents and diplomats aren’t the only ones calling for climate action at the United Nations. During the opening ceremony of today’s climate summit, â&#128;&#139;Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner—a 26-year-old poet from the Marshall Islands—spoke eloquently about the threat that rising seas pose to her country.

Jetnil-Kijiner warned delegates of the high price of inaction and described the current challenge as a “race to save humanity.”

“Those of us from Oceania are already experiencing it first hand,” she said. “We’ve seen waves crashing into our homes…We look at our children and wonder how they will know themselves or their culture should we lose our islands.”

“We need a radical change of course,” she added. “It means ending carbon pollution within my lifetime. It means supporting those of us most affected to prepare for unavoidable climate impacts. And it means taking responsibility for irreversible loss and damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions.”

You can read more about Jetnil-Kijiner here.

Video via TckTckTck.

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This Poet From a Tiny Island Nation Just Shamed The World’s Leaders

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Chart: Happy Days Are Here Again—for the Superwealthy

by SherryLedesma Posted on September 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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With Washington paralyzed on bread-and-butter issues and the midterms ahead, we put together a primer on the state of America’s frozen paychecks. We’ll be posting a new chart every day for the next couple of weeks. Today’s chart: How the recovery left most Americans behind.

The Great Recession officially ended five years ago, but that’s news for millions of Americans: A stunning 95 percent of income growth since the recovery started has gone to the superwealthy. The top 1 percent has captured almost all post-recession income growth. Compare that with how they did during these historic booms:

Sources: Boom and recovery gains, 1% gains: Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty (Excel); average household income: Census Bureau.

Illustrations and infographic design by Mattias Macklerâ&#128;&#139;

Photos: Warner Bros; Peter Morgan/Reuters; Christoph Dernbach/DPA/ZumaPress; Steve Jennings/Wireimage/Getty Images; Bo Rader/Witchita Eagle/MCT/Getty Images; Kimberly White/Reuters

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Chart: Happy Days Are Here Again—for the Superwealthy

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Is This Deep-Fried-Yam Chef the Future of Texas Politics?

by DeniseAvelar Posted on September 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Milton Whitley’s gift to Texas was called twisted yam on a stick. You take a yam, cut it into a spiral, deep fry it, cover it in butter, smother it in sugar, coat it in cinnamon, eat. Is it healthy? Of course it’s healthy—yam is a superfood. The final product was a finalist at the 2009 Texas State Fair, before losing out to the eventual winner, deep-fried butter.

A native of Dallas County, Whitley started off as a catfish cook and worked his way up the comfort food chain to an appearance on national television presenting Oprah and Gayle with a homemade sweet potato pie. He now teaches science at a public school. But last year he set his sights on something more daunting than the fried-food contest at the state fair—getting elected to the Texas Legislature as a Democrat. Whitley, who’s running in the Dallas-area 113th state House district, is one of a dozen candidates selected as part of a trial program for Battleground Texas, the Democratic organizing project launched last spring by a cast of Obama campaign veterans who are hoping to turn the nation’s largest red state blue.

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Is This Deep-Fried-Yam Chef the Future of Texas Politics?

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Inside the Biggest Climate March in History

by JessikaSegura Posted on September 21, 2014

Mother Jones

View the story “Live: Thousands Take to the Streets Around the World to Demand Climate Action” on Storify

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Inside the Biggest Climate March in History

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Thanks to Obamacare, Way Fewer Women Have To Pay Extra For Birth Control

by Jim Thorpe Posted on September 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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There’s some good news for women who would rather not pay an arm and a leg to keep from getting pregnant.

The Guttmacher Institute, which tracks reproductive health costs, has been periodically surveying a group of 1,800 privately insured women ages 18-39 about how much they pay out of pocket for various kinds of birth control. The first survey was in the fall of 2012, just before the Affordable Care Act required insurance plans to stop applying co-pays or deductibles to most contraceptives. At the time, only 15 percent of the women said they didn’t have to pay anything over and beyond their monthly premiums. By the spring of 2014, that percentage had more than quadrupled.

It’s not just women who benefit. Given that contraception is far cheaper than the cost of unintended pregnancies, there are also plenty of savings for employers and insurers. So why do roughly one out of three women with private insurance still have to pay extra for the Pill, say, when the ACA supposedly forbids it? According to Judy Waxman, vice president of health and reproductive rights at the National Women’s Law Center, many women are still on plans established before March 2010 that were “grandfathered” into the law, meaning they don’t have to comply with the new rules. If an insurer wants to change a plan significantly, however, it’ll lose the exemption. About a quarter of health plans still have the grandfather status, Waxman says, but they’re disappearing fast.

Then, of course, there’s the Hobby Lobby contingent: employers who say their religious objections to birth control should excuse them from covering some, if not all, forms of it. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 90 religious challenges are now pending in the federal courts, and judges have allowed many employers to withhold coverage of contraceptives until their cases are resolved. (The ACA already exempts churches, religious colleges, and certain other institutions from its mandate.)

There are a handful of insurers still charging extra for birth control in violation of the law, says Adam Sonfield, a public policy analyst at Guttmacher and an author of the study. Either they don’t understand the rules, haven’t yet updated their billing procedures, or are breaking the law deliberately. “The way insurance is regulated is pretty diffuse,” he says. “We know there are still insurers out there inappropriately interpreting the rules.”

The National Women’s Law Center has a step-by-step guide on its website for women who think they’re being charged when they shouldn’t be. It’s unclear, Waxman says, how many women have convinced their insurers to fix the problems, but the center is applying pressure and working with insurers and state officials when they catch wind of a conflict.

Overall, Sonfield and Waxman see the Guttmacher numbers as a big win. And given how surprisingly expensive it can be just to cover the out-of-pocket costs, the report makes the recent GOP push for over-the-counter contraceptives—leaving women to pay the full price—even less attractive. “This analysis shows that the contraceptive coverage guarantee under the ACA is working as intended,” Sonfield writes. Adds Waxman: “It’s a great improvement.”

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Thanks to Obamacare, Way Fewer Women Have To Pay Extra For Birth Control

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These Stunning Photos of Greenland’s "Dark Snow" Should Worry You

by CaitlynEoff Posted on September 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Isn’t ice supposed to be white? Jason Box

This story originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration.

Jason Box knows ice. That’s why what’s happened this year concerns him so much.

Box just returned from a trip to Greenland. Right now, the ice there is…black:

Dark ice is helping Greenland’s glaciers retreat. Jason Box

Crevasses criss-cross the Greenland ice sheet, allowing melt water to descend deep beneath the ice. Jason Box

This year, Greenland’s ice was the darkest it’s ever been. Jason Box

Box and his team are trying to discover what made this year’s melt season so unusual. Jason Box

Box marks his study sites, appropriately, with black flags. Jason Box

Box’s ‘Dark Snow’ project is the first scientific expedition to Greenland to be crowdfunded. Jason Box

The ice in Greenland this year isn’t just a little dark—it’s record-setting dark. Box says he’s never seen anything like it. I spoke to Box by phone earlier this month, just days after he returned from his summer field research campaign.

“I was just stunned, really,” Box told me.

The photos he took this summer in Greenland are frightening. But their implications are even more so. Just like black cars are hotter to the touch than white ones on sunny summer days, dark ice melts much more quickly.

As a member of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Box travels to Greenland from his home in Copenhagen to track down the source of the soot that’s speeding up the glaciers’ disappearance. He aptly calls his crowdfunded scientific survey Dark Snow.

This year was another above-average melt season in Greenland. National Snow and Ice Data Center

There are several potential explanations for what’s going on here. The most likely is that some combination of increasingly infrequent summer snowstorms, wind-blown dust, microbial activity, and forest fire soot led to this year’s exceptionally dark ice. A more ominous possibility is that what we’re seeing is the start of a cascading feedback loop tied to global warming. Box mentions this summer’s mysterious Siberian holes and offshore methane bubbles as evidence that the Arctic can quickly change in unpredictable ways.

This year, Greenland’s ice sheet was the darkest Box (or anyone else) has ever measured. Box gives the stunning stats: “In 2014 the ice sheet is precisely 5.6 percent darker, producing an additional absorption of energy equivalent with roughly twice the US annual electricity consumption.”

Perhaps coincidentally, 2014 will also be the year with the highest number of forest fires ever measured in Arctic.

Box ran these numbers exclusively for Slate, and what he found shocked him. Since comprehensive satellite measurements began in 2000, never before have Arctic wildfires been as powerful as this year. In fact, over the last two or three years, Box calculated that Arctic fires have been burning at a rate that’s double that of just a decade ago. Box felt this finding was so important that he didn’t want to wait for peer review, and instead decided to publish first on Slate. He’s planning on submitting these and other recent findings to a formal scientific journal later this year.

Arctic and sub-Arctic fires were more powerful in 2014 than ever recorded before. Jason Box/NASA

Box’s findings are in line with recent research that shows the Arctic is in the midst of dramatic change.

In total, more than 3.3 million hectares burned in Canada’s Northwest Territories alone this year—nearly 9 times the long term average—resulting in a charred area bigger than the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined. That figure includes the massive Birch Creek Complex, which could end up being the biggest wildfire in modern Canadian history. In July, it spread a smoke plume all the way to Portugal.

In an interview with Canada’s National Post earlier this year, NASA scientist Douglas Morton said, “It’s a major event in the life of the earth system to have a huge set of fires like what you are seeing in Western Canada.”

Box says the real challenge is to rank what fraction of the soot he finds on the Greenland ice is from forest fires, and what is from other sources, like factories. Box says the decline of snow cover in other parts of the Arctic (like Canada) is also exposing more dirt to the air, which can then be more easily transported by the wind. Regardless of their ultimate darkening effect on Greenland, this year’s vast Arctic fires have become a major new source of greenhouse gas emissions from the thawing Arctic. Last year, NASA scientists found “amazing” levels of carbon dioxide and methane emanating from Alaskan permafrost.

Earlier this year, Box made headlines for a strongly worded statement along these lines:

That tweet landed Box in a bit of hot water with his department, which he said now has to approve his media appearances. Still, Box’s sentiment is inspiring millions. His “f’d” quote is serving as the centerpiece of a massive petition (with nearly 2 million signatures at last count) that the activist organization Avaaz will deliver to “national, local, and international leaders” at this month’s global warming rally in New York City on Sept. 21.

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These Stunning Photos of Greenland’s "Dark Snow" Should Worry You

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