Greenland’s ice sheet is releasing huge amounts of mercury into rivers(newscientist.com) |
Greenland’s ice sheet is releasing huge amounts of mercury into rivers(newscientist.com) |
> In 2016, a group of scientists evaluated the environmental impact and estimated that due to changing weather patterns over the next few decades, melt water could release the nuclear waste, 200,000 liters of diesel fuel, a nontrivial quantity of PCBs, and 24 million liters of untreated sewage into the environment as early as the year 2090. Transition in ice sheet surface mass balance at Camp Century from net accumulation to net ablation is plausible within the next 75 years under one climate model, and after another 44 to 88 years the buried wastes could be exposed between 2135 and 2179.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century#Residual_environm...
A concern and one we should fix, but a time bomb?
- So, Sir David, what's worries you most?
- The Greenland Ice Sheet. If it melts human civilisation is finished.
- oh. And err is it melting?
- Yes, and accelerating.
- Oh.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.5.020563/fu...
Besides it's climate impact and heat transfer mechanism it will likely disturb the other ocean currents that are import for a stable climate as well.
Yes, an Antarctic melt would be worse, but it's far less likely.
I'm going to choose to worry about other things.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-climate-models-suggest-faste...
Those of you downvoting me to banish your anxiety should find a healthier outlet for your issues.
That carbonbrief article links to the underlying paper at : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20011-8
The paper reports on an update of previous studies, and the results are reported mainly as changes from the previous material to reflect the impact that changes in the modelling decisions.
I can't tell where the 2.1 cm to 5 cm numbers come from (searching the paper for "2.1" is interesting).
Here is a table from the paper reported as total sea level impact estimates and 1 stddev range, rather than deltas : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20011-8/tables/1
It reports the expected 2100 see level rise from Greenland ice melt of 6 different scenarios, in two methodologies. The low, low stddev at 3.7 cm, and the high, high stddev at 25.6 cm.
And of course sea level may also be rising from other sources, that just isn't covered in the paper you mention.
You get to pick your personal items to worry about based on your individual assumptions and interests, but if your opinion is based in part on that specific paper you might want to reread it.
The only related thing I could find in your linked report was to estimate contributions up by 2.6cm/2.8 cm/5cm (different scenarios) from CMIP5 to CMIP6, not in total. Maybe I missed something?
By and large, we really don't need more resources to mine, but to use what we have more efficiently.
I'm sure there are a few edge cases, but the attitude that we should look for more and more to exploit is what leads to deforestation, the biggest loss of species diversity since the last ice age, global warming and a serious toll on the health of today's people.
I think it really captures what the the problem is, rather then making it some concept that seems abstract and immovable to the average person. Lots of people deny climate change, almost no one denies that humans pollute a lot.
Just so that you have the ability to fully ruin your day
Submitted URL was https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releas....
By the way, for anyone interested, an easy way to bust these is simply to pick a likely-unique string from the article you suspect of being a ripoff and google it with quotes around it. If there's a more original source, it will probably come up:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22It+is+a+region+that+conta...
Sometimes I have to do this a few times before hitting the jackpot, but in my experience: if content looks copied, it probably is.
There's also a subtype that deliberately circumvents this trick. There is a type of ad fraudster that rips off of, e.g. native German-speaking writers, runs their work through machine translation, and publishes the English output as original.
I encountered several examples on some technical subs on Reddit (not yet on HN). It took a disproportionate amount of effort to unmask even one -- the method that ended up succeeding was to guess which technical terms could be idempotent under translation, and (&&) some together until the result set is small enough. (It's harder to reverse translate, because unless you're an expert translator, you probably don't know what the source language was).
I've only seen a handful of these, but because of how difficult it is to detect, I'd speculate there could be a sizeable population in the wild. The writing is technically correct and non-suspicious, because it's written by a human expert in another language. It strongly resists reverse Google searches. And it resists social unmasking, because social groups who speak different languages tend to have distance between them.
It's a clever evil.
Easily getting us to the edge of what is livable even with advanced technology.
Climate change sounds too neutral. It should've been called climate destruction or such, but the name was picked by Big Oil.
Telling people there is a pollutions epidemic, that is something they can immediately relate too. It doesn't matter that the smoke stack they drive past every day is just water vapor, they hear "pollution epidemic", they see what they interpret as pollution, their brain tells them "yeah, this is real".
Remember this phrasing isn't for educated or knowledgeable people, it's for common folk who don't put much thought into anything.
I seem to get downvoted every time I mention this, as apparently people want to forget global warming was ever bolstered by, "look how hot it is" and they would prefer to just now ridicule people for the same errors their side was guilty of for literally decades.
So yes, the event is real. Ridiculing opponents for making the same argument with the same temporary data points isn't winning anything.
“We knew that the first direct image of a black hole would be groundbreaking,” said Kazuhiro Hada of the
“We knew that the first uninterrupted image of a black hole would be revolutionary,” says Kazuhiro Hada of the
Original is [0] and plagiarized is [1] (linked indirectly because the other URL is probably blacklisted on here, and possibly malicious).This one was the cleanest of several examples I found*. I think the technique is widespread and broadly successful, based on my anecdotal experience. It's easy to find a diversity of examples in smaller-sized Reddit subs, the ones with less paranoid moderation and spam AI settings.
The machine translation examples are far harder to detect (to me); I'll update you if I discover one again in the future. The ones I found several years back appear to no longer exist.
[0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/telescopes-unite-in-unpreceden...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/njbrec/data_from_1...
* (Because I could reliably identify the original document, and because the edit of a direct quotation from a named individual is an air-tight example of fraud).
Someone should try running the OP through machine translation into some other language and then back into English. I wonder if that would produce the effect you're describing. I might try this later if I remember!
Edit: I tried running the first few paragraphs through Google translate into German and back into English. I'll post the two version as replies to this comment. I also did this via Dutch (which unsurprisingly came back closer to English), Italian, and Russian.
It seems clear that you are right. The translations are good enough for blogspam and can be used to evade detection. For example,
https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9C%5BMercury+concentr...
doesn't find the original. Other sentences I tried do get picked up by Google as references to the OP, but this can be circumvented. For example, this sentence from the English->German->English text gets picked up correctly:
https://www.google.com/search?q=The+discovery+is+worrying+si...
But the corresponding sentence from the English->Russian->English text does not:
https://www.google.com/search?q=This+finding+is+worrying+bec...
Human civilization didn’t, because human civilization didn’t exist at the last glacial maximum, and almost all of that rise was before human civilization existed. Low density nomadic hunter-gatherer existence is less disrupted by sea level change than settled agriculture and industry.
[1]https://ocean.si.edu/through-time/ancient-seas/sea-level-ris...
The modern sense of "environmental contamination" in common parlance dates largely to the early 1960s:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=pollution&year...
I have never failed to convince anyone in my midwest sphere of influence (midwest, know far right and far left folks) that ‘pollution’ needs to be dealt with.
You can replace ‘climate change’ in an essay with pollution and dramatically simplify changing peoples mind.
The problem was re-framed because western industry mostly stopped belching obvious pollution and that framing of the problem did not resonate with western voters who could see that the rivers and sky were cleaner than they'd ever been. It used to be that smog was a feature of weekly weather in urban areas and if your dog jumped in a river 50mi downstream of a textile factory you'd know what color they were making the day before. By the 90s that kind of stuff was cleaned up a ton.
Not everything you don't like is the result of the evil other guys.
An ice sheet in the southwestern region of Greenland is releasing huge amounts of mercury into nearby rivers. The discovery is worrying as the toxic metal can accumulate in the marine animals that are a key dietary component for local Indigenous communities.
Mercury is a naturally occurring metal found in some rocks. As glaciers slowly flow downhill, they grind up the underlying rocks, potentially releasing mercury into their meltwater.
To find out whether this is occurring in Greenland, Jon Hawkings at Florida State University and his colleagues analysed meltwater flowing from the southwestern margin of the Greenland ice sheet.
Hawkings and his team completed two expeditions to Greenland in 2015 and 2018, collecting water samples from three meltwater rivers that receive substantial amounts of water from the Greenland ice sheet – up to 800 cubic metres per second. The samples were filtered to remove any sediment and kept safe from contamination. Then the researchers analysed the mercury concentration in each one.
“[Mercury concentrations in this region] are at least 10 times higher than in an average river,” says Hawkings. This means the meltwater is as rich in mercury as some highly polluted rivers – except in this case the mercury hasn’t been introduced into the water directly by humans. “Although this mercury isn’t introduced by humans, the ice sheet is melting much faster as a result of climate change,” says Hawkings.
An ice sheet in the southwestern region of Greenland releases huge amounts Quantities of mercury in nearby rivers. The discovery is worrying since the poisonous metal can accumulate in marine animals, which are a key Nutritional component for local indigenous communities.
Mercury is a naturally occurring metal found in some rocks. How Glaciers slowly flow downhill, they grind the rock below, possibly releasing mercury into their meltwater.
To find out if this happens in Greenland, Jon Hawkings at Florida State University and his colleagues analyzed flowing meltwater from the southwestern edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Hawkings and his team completed two expeditions to Greenland in 2015 and 2018 water samples from three meltwater rivers that receive significant amounts of water from the Greenland ice sheet - up up to 800 cubic meters per second. The samples were filtered to remove them any sediment and protected from contamination. Then the researchers analyzed the mercury concentration in each.
“[Mercury concentrations in this region] are at least ten times higher than an average river, ”says Hawkings. That is, the meltwater is as rich in mercury as some heavily polluted rivers - except here if the mercury was not brought directly into the water People. “Although this mercury is not introduced by humans, the ice is The sheet metal melts much faster due to climate change, ”says Hawkings.
https://www.spektrum.de/news/schwermetall-quecksilber-in-gro...
As far as I can tell, (1) there's absolutely nothing suspicious about the ML translation into English, and (2) there's no easy or reliable way to find the original article, given only the translation.
This bizarre query can find it (as the 3rd result). I don't think any "natural" query can.
https://www.google.com/search?q="42"+"2015"+"2018"+"Nature+G...
For convenience:
"Melting glaciers in southwest Greenland wash up to 42 tons of mercury per year into the surrounding rivers. That is around ten percent of the total mercury transported by rivers into the ocean worldwide, reports a team led by Jon R. Hawkings from Florida State University in Tallahassee. The poisonous heavy metal presumably comes from the rock at the bottom of the glacier, writes the working group in "Nature Geoscience". In 2015 and 2018, she examined three rivers that carry meltwater from the ice cap to the sea. The mercury concentrations there were at least ten times higher than in an average river - and comparable to waters that were heavily polluted by industry."
"In Greenland, however, humans are only indirectly involved. Measurements of meltwater from the top of the glacier show that the metal did not come from there. That would have indicated that it would have been deposited from the air and thus from technical sources. But the mercury probably comes from the rock under the glacier. Greenland's rock is gradually being crushed by the slowly creeping ice. This process also releases ore deposits, and thus metals such as mercury. However, people are not completely uninvolved. As a result of climate change, Greenland's ice is melting faster and faster, and more meltwater is getting under the glacier and leaching out the crushed ore."
"The finding shows that natural sources of heavy metal could also react sensitively to climate change, writes the Hawkings team. In addition, such sources are much more difficult to reduce than industrial emissions. Mercury is a particularly problematic environmental toxin because it is so toxic and primarily accumulates in the food chain in the form of methylmercury. The mercury from the glacier is particularly dangerous for indigenous communities, where fish and other marine animals make up a high proportion of the food. But in Germany too, fish contains considerable amounts of mercury compounds, primarily tuna, shark and eel. Small children and pregnant women should therefore avoid such fish."
"Whether it takes another 200 or 2000 years largely depends on how quickly the ice sheets melt. Even if global warming were to stop today, sea level would continue to rise."
-- from the same article (2 sentences later)
7 meter rise over 2 centuries can likely be managed in a reasonable manner via land taxation, resettlement, wall, and levy construction. 7 meter rise in 5 years would likely collapse most of the western world as major population centers find themselves unlivably under water.
What we get is every single existing ocean port city (which is a lot of the largest cities) being threatened by more frequent flooding. They're all right at sea level, because that's where you build port cities. Not all of these cities really depend on being ports any more, but that's how they became major population and business centers.
They don't just pick up and move something like that. There's no place you can say, "Oh, they're going to move New York over to X, so I'll buy land there now". Even if they did for some reason decide that it was so bad they had to abandon New York (or Charleston or San Francisco or lots of others), there's no one place that it goes. The whole human geography of it changes.