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.