Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.
Went out to the woods by the river Sunday afternoon with Mom and Dad. The leaves are pretty much at their peak. It was lovely. And I see I wasn’t alone in my blog-flickr-journeying.
Melting Glaciers
Johannes Koch of Simon Fraser University says “many” glaciers in Western Canada are the smallest they’ve been in the last 7,000 years:
Glacier retreat in western Canada and other regions is exposing fossil tree stumps, soils, and plant detritus that, until recently, were beneath tens to hundreds of metres of ice. Dating of these fossils indicates that many of these glaciers are smaller today than they have been at any time in the past 7000 years. This evidence, in turn, suggests that glacier recession in the twentieth century is unprecedented during the past several millennia and that glaciers in western Canada have reached minimum extents only 150 years after they achieved their maximum Holocene extent.
Presentation this week at the GSA meeting in Denver.
“Doing nothing is not an option.”
The Imperial Valley of southeastern California is a remarkable creation of a modern industrial-hydraulic society. One might argue that the story of the modern western United States begins there. It was ambitious Imperial Valley land speculators shortly after the last turn of the century who, as much as anyone else, drove the development of what finally became the Colorado River Compact, which divided up the Colorado’s water on paper, and Hoover Dam, which made the paper plan a hydraulic reality. Which is why what is happening there today is so remarkable.
Big Toe and I. Bat at the Village Inn
Big Toe and Icebat at the Village Inn
Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.
I was going through some photos I took Thursday night when I found this. Nora and I went to the Village Inn on Central, in part because they have sugar-free apple pie and in part because it’s an endlessly amusing place. Apparently Big Toe and I. Bat were spying on us, hiding behind the menus for the special Royal Mountie Cheeseburger (Canadian-style bacon!) and Elite Pies. I’m not sure how they got in without us noticing. Could they have been waiting for us? But how would they have known which table we would sit at? Could the Village Inn staff be involved?
A New Bike Trail
The folks at Spa and Billiard Supply in Albuquerque must be delighted. Work is underway on a new bicycle trail along the north side of Interstate 40 that will give cyclists excellent access to their store. In the past, cyclists who wanted to buy a spa or billiard supplies didn’t have any good options.
As an aside, the new trail will also greatly improve access to my neighborhood, cutting down both the distance between my house and the main bike trail system, as well as the number of dangerous intersections I have to negotiate. And it’ll also be easier for me to buy billiard supplies.
Stuff I Multimediaed Elsewhere
We’re experimenting with video at the office. Here’s a piece video guy Troy Simpson and I did on research being done out at Sandia Labs.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Dave: Take Shorter Showers
North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley has asked my friend Dave to take shorter showers:
The Governor of North Carolina, Mike Easley, announced on Tuesday he is calling on citizens across North Carolina to cut water consumption by 50 percent between now and Halloween. I guess you could think of this as a big science fair project, but on a state level.
Climate Change and California Fires
Aquafornia has a great compilation of reporting on the question of a climate change link with respect to the California fires. The bottom line? Yes! No! Maybe!
The most compelling research to me on this question is Westerling et al. in Science last year. Aquafornia quotes an LA Times piece with a nice summary of the result:
The study, however, found Southern California was different from the rest of the West, with no increase in the frequency of fire as temperatures rose. “In Southern California, it’s hot and dry much of the year,” said Anthony Westerling, a climate scientist at UC Merced and the study’s lead author. In other words, Southern California was already perfect for fire.