Sunday, December 31, 2006

Sometimes, you get to use common sense

Novel or terrible events, when they’re BIG and loaded with implications, are hard to get one’s mind around. One tends to ignore them, forget them. —You know, like the fact that our Iraq adventure has probably cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

This morning, I read an article in the New York Times about an enormous ice shelf off the northern coast of Canada’s Ellesmere Island. The shelf existed for 3,000 years. (Arctic Ice Shelf Broke Off Canadian Island.)

Now, we are told, it broke off and floated out to sea.

That can’t be good.

I know: things get complicated. But, sometimes, even when things are complex, you get to use common sense. These ice shelves are much thicker and older than the thin stuff floating at the North Pole. I mean, there's ice, and then there's ice.

And this enormous hunk of ice hung around for 3,000 years. And now it’s gone. Melted.

Not good.

4 comments:

Professor Zero said...

Yes. Pretty scary.

Anonymous said...

Change is constant.

Anonymous said...

You're freakin' me out, man.

3,000 years? Really. Uh-oh.

Anonymous said...

Chill out, 9:05 (no pun intended) 3,000 years is a wink of an eye in relationship to geological time.

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...