Oceans Rising....

As oceans rise due to climate change, entire countries are threatened by the increasing of high tide lines. Here in the Marshall Islands where the total height above sea level averages no more than three (3) feet every part of the nation is threatened. This photo is not a storm, its a by-monthly tide...

The thing that impacts increased tidal lines the most is not, surprisingly, the return of ice and glacial run off to the seas... its the increase in ocean volume due to expansion caused by an increase in ocean temperature. Raise the average temperature of the ocean by just 1 or 2 degrees and it will expand a corresponding 1%+...that's an extra 1000 gallons or more for every million gallons experienced today.

Raise the seas three feet and the Marshalls are gone... but so are parts of the Bahamas, sections of Florida, Australia, Russia ...flooding in London, Tokyo, Baltimore... heck, New Orleans is already below sea level...raise the oceans and the water will find a way into our cities, increase brackish water in rivers, corrupt our aquifers...world wide...and this isn't a guess...its happening now.

The question isn't if it is going to happen...it is when it will happen to you. Ask yourself "What will we do when we have 100-Million tidal refuges looking for a new place to live the world over?"

And after that?
Well we better have a plan....

Where did the moon come from?

The moon, 1/4 of the diameter of the earth, non-rotating and only 1/80th of
the density of the Earth, circles the earth in less than 24 hours and, along with the
gravitational force of the sun, influences tides and winds worldwide.

But where did our moon come from, and why is it less dense and absent an iron core like that of Earth? There are several theories that have been proposed… but most have no explanation for the lack of iron nor for the lack of water … both components that would be expected on a planet developed in conjunction with ours. Here are some ideas proposed:

- The molten earth, continuing in its formative rotation, developed massive waves,
not merely hundreds of feet high, but potentially thousands of feet high causing a literal separation of billions of tons of surface matter, spun off from the surface that excluded the already densely formed iron core…too heavy to break free. Both bodies continued to form for billions of years…the moon, absent a rotating core and nearly no atmosphere, cooled and formed, while the earth continued to rotate and evolve (Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us).

- Others once believed the Moon came from another part of the Universe with little iron, strayed near the Earth’s gravitational field, and was drawn into orbit. This, too, failed for three main reasons. This is called the Capture Hypothesis. One was due to the fact that the isotope composition of Moon rocks is very similar to that of rocks from our planet. Second is the
necessity for a very small (thus, highly unlikely) encounter velocity. And third, is the absence of a very thick atmosphere that should have been present to provide a so-called gas drag that would have helped in the capture process.

- Co-Formation Hypothesis proposes that both the Moon and the Earth were formed at practically the same time and in the same region in the solar nebula, drawing materials to each other from the dust around them. While this hypothesis is consistent with the proximity of the two bodies, it is difficult to explain why they the Moon doesn’t have as much iron as the Earth.

- Of all of these hypotheses that strive to explain the Moon’s origin, it is the Giant Impact that has received the widest acceptance. In this hypothesis, the Moon is believed to have been originally a part of the Earth’s crust, whacked out by a collision between the Earth and another body bearing
the size of Mars. As we consider the Giant Impact Hypothesis note that since the whacked-out
piece may have certainly come from the outer layer of the Earth (the crust), then this explains the lack of iron in the Moon. Furthermore, computer simulations also show how this theory is also consistent with angular momentum measurements.

Water just about everywhere...but only 1% to drink!

We find water the world over ... 96% of which is salt water in our oceans and seas. 3%...an amazing quantity really, is in our ice and snow...and 1% is fresh water in our aquifers, rivers, lakes and streams. Only 1%! and with that 1% we need to sustain life of all animals...pretty difficult when we now have a human population of 7Billion...going to 10Billion within view...

But what if we loose our ice? (Will we loose our ice?)... in 1951 Rachel Carson published The Sea Around Us in which she noted that we are in a cycle on the cooler to warmer track that has both long range cyclic impact (about 100,000 years) and inside of this there are shorter cycles ranging from 2000 to 3000 years...cold to warm and back to cold. She suggested back in the early 50s that we were on a warming leg of a short cycle...the long cycle being the ice age maker... and that we should expect ice to continue to recede, glaciers to vanish, and temperatures to go up.

We began exploring the Antarctic Continent in the 1800s...mapping its frozen coasts...landing infrequently until 1900 or so...when Shackleton and Scott lead their explorations into this hostile and treacherous land. Today about 45,000 tourists visit Antarctica each year to see what appears to be a vanishing land of ice.

In many ways the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica resemble the rubbled plains of Mars...so it was surprising to find extremophiles sustaining themselves in this frozen wasteland who remain dormant for decades awaiting temperatures warm enough and water pools ready to sustain their life forms. Yet if the globe continues to warm we may yield an even wider variety of unique life forms in this mysterious land (E. Willson, The Future of Life).

Today (Nov 2nd, 2011) we know that the Antarctice ice sheet is shedding a potential iceberg...with a fissure 165 feet deep, 18 miles long and increasing in width by 6 to 8 feet per day... this 300 square mile berg will be huge. Changes in patterns however are not necessarily part of global warming...ice is mobile and breaches in active sheets and glaciers are not indications that they are failing... it is the warming of the oceans ...by 2 or 3 degrees that should alert us, for that is an amazing amount of stored energy and represents a game-changing potential that could erase ice and snow from our poles and raise the oceans by hundreds of feet.

Not anytime soon however... in human years anyway. Though we are on Carson's warming trend we should expect this to take hundreds of years, if not longer...and if we are acting to solve the technical problems necessary to survive then man has a chance to make it...assuming that we don't overpopulate too much, and figure out the other issues necessary to sustain life. I guess time will tell...and it really is an adventure, isn't it.

So we should be setting goals to address sustainable issues for future generations, those in the crunch before the cold, and find a way to solve the enviornmental, economic, and equity questions that all of this change (real and potential) are raising.