Will Greenland get greener?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, exploration, geography, science, greenland, global warming, climate change

The main title of The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland's Buried Past and our Perilous Future, by Jon Gertner, embodies a double entendre. Even today, to be in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet puts you at a "pole of inaccessibility", really at the end of the Earth; and what happens to that ice could indeed portend the end of the world (though not the Earth).

World versus Earth: The Earth is the physical planet, "third rock from the Sun", from its core to the edge of the atmosphere a few thousand miles above the surface, including the biosphere, of course. The world is the collection of human civilizations and systems that form the environment for human life and living. The Earth is incredibly robust. The biosphere is very robust. The world is fragile. Even the much-vaunted "western world" that provides comfort, sustenance, and amazing conveniences to about one-third of the total human population, is remarkably fragile.

About a tenth of the world population, nearly 700 million, lives at or below an elevation of 10m above sea level. For every meter of sea level rise, about a tenth of these (more at first, fewer later) will have to move uphill. But the three laws of real estate value, "location, location, location", meaning "higher ground for better view (except for that seaside vacation home!), close to conveniences (stores, etc.), and close to work" will drive costs up, and up and up.

The Ice at the End starts with the history of the exploration of Greenland. While it is called the largest island, I think of it as the smallest continent. It is nearly 1/3 the size of Australia, and is about 3 times the size of the New Guinea island. Being mostly covered with an ice cap about two miles thick makes its exploration extremely arduous at best, any time prior to the use of aircraft and tracked heavy vehicles; now it is merely "very arduous". One of my favorite turn-of-the century scientists, Alfred Wegener, died there at age 50, in 1930.

Once the early explorers, combining European and Inuit materials and methods, showed it is possible to cross the ice sheet, scientists made up a growing proportion of "visitors", a proportion that exploded once the American military began pouring money into Arctic exploration right after World War II. Now the ice volume can be measured daily by satellite, on-ice expeditions can continue to determine snowfall accumulation and compaction rates, and ice cores have been drilled to bedrock in a few locations. Now the true significance of Greenland and its ice are becoming clear.

To cut to the chase: Even if we ignore Antarctica, progressive melting of Greenland's ice alone can cause catastrophic damage to the infrastructure of every nation that has a coastline (nearly all of them). I gathered a number of calculated amounts for the amount of water in that ice. If it were all put into the ocean at once, without heating up beyond melting temperature, the seas would rise by 27 feet, or 8.2 meters. Then, as it warmed to the 40°F (4°C) average temperature of the ocean, sea level would rise about another couple of inches (5-6 cm).

Compare that to current rates. Since the 1960's, sea level has risen between 3 and 3.3 mm/yr. About a third of that is from Greenland, about half from ocean thermal expansion, and the rest from Antarctica, mainly the Thwaites glacier and a few lesser ones. See this montage:

The four images of Greenland plus Iceland were made in December of 1984, 1994, 2004, and 2014, from left to right. It may be hard to see the decrease in ice cover from decade to decade. The total difference in ice volume over these thirty years is 0.75%. Here is a closeup of the northeast quadrant, where the difference is more evident:

On first sight, one may say, "It's just a difference in snow cover," but with a careful look, one may see that the ice front has also receded, and we need to note that the entire ice sheet has gotten thinner by more than a half percent (30 ft or 9.5 m) in that time. Over that same interval the sea has risen nearly 100mm, or 4". And a third of that was Greenland's ice melting, over and above the snow that fell.

Though I am a political/social conservative, I have long known of the greenhouse effect, and what it can do to this planet. Will rising temperatures and rising seas drive human life off the Earth? That isn't likely. However, those phenomena will drive humans inland everywhere, and will likely eliminate a few oceanic nations such as the Maldives, Palau and Tuvalu. Of continental nations, Bangladesh would be one of the hardest hit: a quarter of its land area is below an elevation of 8m.

I have always been in favor of research into renewable energy, primarily solar. At present levels of efficiency, it would take less than 200,000 square miles (500,000 sq km) of solar panels to meet all energy needs for the world. That's about the area of Spain, but it would be spread everywhere, mainly within 40° of the equator. This needs to be coupled with better batteries to take care of cloudy days. At present prices, the investment would be huge, something like 200 times the world yearly GDP. However, research also results in lower prices, which can only help.

Someone who denies the importance of climate change would call this book a polemic. I do not. It is even-handed and factual, without the shrillness that pervades so much public discourse on the subject. I learned some great history and gained a better perspective on the importance of Greenland in the total ice/water/ocean budget of the planet. I recommend the book, no matter what your political stance.

Return of the Russian spiders

kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I checked into my blog stats, and what did I see?
A mess of Russian (and Ukrainian) spiders, lookin' back at me!

The top of the chart's scale, 178, represents activity from Russia for the past week...or really, for the past couple of days. Another 44 hits came via Ukraine. Looking at the past 24 hours:

The 169 hits are again Russian, and another 15 from Ukraine. That spike of 56 hits around 7:00 pm EST, flanked by 15 the hour before and 15 the hour after, is about equal to two good days' activity from all sources, when the spiders are dormant.

Considering the timing, it's a good bet the spiders were sent to gather our thoughts on the political theater going on just now. After all, the Democrats used a Russian-modeled Kangaroo court to hold their "impeachment hearings", and now they are trying to coerce the Senate to do the same. I am thankful that the senior Senators remember the machinations of the Cold War well enough to recognize it for what it is, and take a more honest way (whether it is to be an entirely honest way remains to be seen).

I wonder how much spider activity the really popular blogs have been getting.

Finding Nebula

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, short stories, collections

My long-term favorite collection of science fiction short stories (with a novella or novelette thrown in) is the Nebula Awards series. This year the new volume with last year's stories is Nebula Awards Showcase 2019, edited by Silvia Morena-Garcia.

The science fiction field has finally emerged from the gutter; starting nearly 50 years ago, writers were released from a tacit and mostly self-imposed censorship regarding sexual subjects. Many of them went wild. Even Isaac Asimov, who had utterly eschewed any sexual content, began writing bad sex scenes into the last few of his Robot and Foundation stories and books.

I avoid reading erotic writing for the same reason I don't go to strip shows: I care about my marriage vows, and I prefer not to gaze or dwell upon who/what I cannot possess. In our mid-seventies, I still think my wife is an unsurpassed beauty; I need no other.

That said: while the writers of this volume of Nebula don't hide sex, it plays about the same part in the stories that any of us might allow it to play in our public lives. Occasional mention, but not the focus. I think the past two generations of readers are finally tired of camera-in-the-bedroom writing. Besides, folks who want those kinds of thrills have about a billion free porn videos available.

I greatly enjoyed most of the stories. There were three that I began, and within a page my spirit protested, so I went on to the next story. Not because of eroticism, but either outright fantasy (which I don't like to read) or a world I preferred not to enter. So I'll mention just a few that I fancied:

• Weaponized Math, by Jonathan P. Brazee – Sniper war setting. A number-wizard turned sniper saves the day.
• All Systems Red, by Martha Wells – The cyborg calls himself Murderbot. The cloned brain and other organic components of this bodyguard of sorts (on a very interesting distant planet) clearly came from a barely functional introvert. Someone after my own heart.
• Wind Will Rove, by Sarah Pinsker – Generation ship setting. They've lost much of their cultural past due to hacking (I keep telling folks, microfilm is the only secure backup for stuff you really want to keep!). Music, and a particular tune with a mixed provenance, help the protagonist stay sane, connecting her to both past and future.
• Carnival Nine, by Caroline M. Yoachim – Wind-up clockwork people. They live around 1,000 days. I hope the days are long; that's only two years and nine months on Earth. Life with a disabled child is tough, no matter what kind of critter you are.

I hope that's enough to whet your appetite.

Delightful letters by a favorite of mine

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, letters

America's Astrophysicist, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, speaks out for science literacy with more passion and authority than anyone else I know. As busy as he is, he corresponds with many who write to him. In Letters from an Astrophysicist he has collected and categorized a goodly number of these.

Be begins with a prologue, titled "Happy 60th Birthday, NASA", in which he congratulates NASA, but points out the political pressure that had to be applied, a decade or so into their existence, to induce them to hire people besides male WASPs for significant positions. He also alludes to his own struggles as a science-hungry black youngster, who has nonetheless succeeded in a career formerly closed to "folks who look like" him.

I'll keep this short. Here is the closing portion of one letter to him:

[writing about the 3 billion nucleotides in human DNA and a set of perhaps similar size in a daddy-long-legs] How could a mere 3 gigabytes do all that. It takes far more just to run my iPhone.

Those 3 gigs don't seem to be enough to just dictate how my brain's 100 billion neurons and their trillions of synapses behave.

A portion of the reply:

Simple sets of "rules"can lead to extraordinary complexity.

Then, after discussing the supply chain needed to deliver milk, based on supply and demand and enlightened greed, he goes on:

…the entire universe is composed of just 92 elements … there are only four fundamental forces of nature … there are only four classes of fundamental particles … nearly all behavior of electromagnetic waves (light) can be derived from a set of four equations that fit on a Post-it® note…

His conclusion: We need not be overwhelmed by the complexity, but ought to be awed by how simple it is.

A part of any scientist's "territory" is questions about God and belief. Dr. Tyson is an agnostic (a more scientific stance than atheism), and though he is frequently challenged (sometimes abused) by believers, answers with grace, but doesn't back down. I appreciate that about him.

If you enjoy science writing at its best, read this, and then others of his books, 9 others by my count.

What extremes can teach us

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biology, extremes, biggest, smallest, fastest, slowest, most dangerous

If you want to know what is the biggest or smallest mammal, bird, tree, or whatever, it has become incredibly easy to do so. However, sometimes the answer is "it depends". You won't get an "it depends" answer from a search engine. But you will from a knowledgeable person. Then, whatever results, it's helpful to dig a bit deeper, to find out the why or how of it.

I was thinking of such a thing, starting with, "What is the heaviest land mammal?". If you look to historic times, the African elephant, which gets as heavy as seven tons (14,000 lbs, 6,400 kilos) easily tops the list. However, if we look back in time, it was probably one of the Titanosaurs. A species recently found in Patagonia (Argentina) must have weighed 85 tons (12 x the biggest elephant). What keeps a species that large from arising again? I first checked on historic oxygen levels…and found that during the "age of dinosaurs" there was a little less oxygen in the atmosphere than there is now. But that may have actually facilitated huge size, because my next thought was physiology. Elephants are mammals, and as such are exothermic; the muscles of all mammals twitch constantly to keep the body warm. This is called "muscle tone". Although larger dinosaurs were almost certainly warmer than their surroundings, they probably didn't have the level of muscle tone found in birds and mammals. If you model an 85-ton mammal, it will overheat, badly. I suppose that elephants represent the extreme end of the trade-off between large size (efficiency and ability to ward off predators) and heating. With a little less oxygen, and a slower overall metabolism, the titanosaurs were possible.

In Superlative: The Biology of Extremes, by Matthew D. LaPlante, we don't find the above comparison, but there are numerous others. For example, there are two contenders for the title of lightest mammal, the Etruscan Shrew and the Bumblebee Bat (Kitti's hog-nosed bat). Both weigh just under 2g, and stretch the limits of packing all the things a mammal needs to live into a tiny body. More to the point in the author's analysis, a 2-gram shrew has such a small brain that its cerebral cortex is less than 1mm thick, and so its neurology can be studied with certain imaging techniques. Larger critters have a cortex that is too thick to be studied that way.

Other small things reveal other limits. The smallest flying insects, fairyflies, include a species that gets as small as 0.16 mm long. The period in a printed book is typically 0.3 to 0.4 mm in diameter. So, while I don't know how many angels could dance on the head of a pin (assuming you could induce them to do so), three or four or more of that species of fairyfly could crowd onto a printed period (assuming you could induce them to do so). But it's a stretch to call what they do "flying". To a fairyfly, air is a thick fluid, and they really kind of row themselves along, using a motion similar to the sculling we might do with our hands to stay afloat in water.

In addition to dealing with size, weight, and speed (cheetahs and sloths, for example), the book contains a chapter on danger. The title of "most dangerous" is incredibly hard to confer. Dangerous how? A handful of the most venomous snakes produce venom that can kill a human in a half hour or less, with an amount almost too small to see. But like other extreme animals, they reward study with discovery. Some components of snake venom are being studied for medical use, such as relieving pain, or liquefying tissue, or conversely, protecting tissues from being liquefied by other components. But there are other measures of danger. A snake species with very potent venom may be shy, and less likely to bite, so it poses less of a danger than an aggressive species.

We must remember that the most dangerous animal is ourselves. Besides that, then, what animal causes the greatest number of untimely human deaths? The hands-down winner is the genus of mosquito, Anopheles, that carries malaria. A few other insects, such as a different mosquito that carries Zika and another that carries West Nile virus, are somewhat distantly behind, as is the Tsetse fly.

There are other ways to measure danger, as in "Dangerous to whom or what?" If you're a flying insect, you're more likely to find yourself in the gullet of a bat than in any other creature. A bat consumes half its body weight in insects nightly; a nursing female takes in twice that. And there are a lot of bats, each of which must eat hundreds to thousands of insects each night. One cave in New Mexico hosts a colony of 20 million bats, and they consume 50 tons or more of insects every night! Someone else can figure out the overall world total, but the yearly "take" of insects by bats exceeds the total biomass of all mammals.

These examples just scratch the surface of a delightful book, that doesn't just tell what is the biggest, smallest, fastest, or whatever, but describes how the quantity is measured, and in many cases, "What's it good for?" Studying the extremes can help us better understand the "usual".

A collection that suits me better

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies

I wonder, is it that Neil Clarke thinks more like I do, or that the editors of the last SF collection I reviewed think so very differently from me? I remarked at the end of that review that the "quality of the editor" matters much, but I ought to have used a word different from "quality". I'll ruminate on that…

Neil Clarke's fourth collection of The Best Science Fiction of the Year (the year 2018) does indeed include a much greater proportion of stories that greatly appeal to me, compared to several of the past year's "Best of" volumes. There are actually a number of excellent writers who have returned to the Dictum of Campbell, "Pose a problem, then solve it." That would include "Okay, Glory" by Elizabeth Bear and "Umberlight" by Carolyn Ives Gilman.

Other stories raise the "alien viewpoint" subgenre to new levels, most notably "When We Were Starless" by Simone Heller and "Theories of Flight" by Linda Nagata. I was quite taken with the love story within "Traces of Us" by Vanessa Fogg, with the overt theme of recorded intelligences, and how complete their experience might be.

I always recognize in Ken Liu's writing a political undercurrent, seeing that I number among my close friends a number of both Taiwan-born and China-born immigrants; that means I get Sino-centric news through channels that most in this country have no access to. In "Byzantine Empathy", though, I find a superb gut-level presentation of the unbridgeable gap between the "caring professional" and the empathy-driven amateur; the latter typically do all the heavy lifting that the former later take advantage of to advance their organizations. The use of VR technology to emotionally move (even propel) an audience will no doubt move off these pages into stark reality in the very near future.

This collection restores my optimism that writers are still having good new ideas, and some of those ideas may well move into mainstream thought. Reading this volume was a refreshing way to close out 2019.