My local alternate weekly in Chico has a “Green Guide”. This week’s lead story was “Scientists break ice in Greenland”. There’s only one problem.
They included a picture of Antarctica with the story.
While also an island of ice like Greenland, there’s extra points deducted for juxtaposing Antarctica with the word “Arctic” in the story.
I find it all hemispherically hilarious. I know geography is hard, but please, do try harder. Google Earth is always helpful at finding those pesky out of the way places you’ve never visited.
UPDATE: To be fair and thorough, I decided to swim upstream into the news feed current to their cited source the “Environmental News Network” to see what map they provided, just in case the map error originated there. ENN had it right and showed Greenland, though they did mention Antarctica in the first sentence talking about the two largest ice sheets on Earth.
source: http://www.enn.com/sci-tech/article/41614
UPDATE2:
About 18 hours after I first published this, the Chico News and Review took out the picture of Antarctica from the online edition, though it remains of course in the print edition.
John Trigge: August 18, 2010 at 3:03 pm
If current climate change is anthropogenic and we are sending ourselves to hell in a hand-basket, studying the Eemian period ice cores is hardly going to be …useful for predictions of future climate.”
And if it isn’t, you’ll have wasted a perfectly good hand-wringing.
You don’t study ice cores to predict the future — you study them to understand the past.
The NEEM Project is seen by the msm as a way to imagine life in a warmer world, which presumably will be our fate if we fail to adopt the ‘precautionary principle’.
I guarantee in six months, when the first studies start coming out, all the chatter will be focussed on abrupt climate change at the end of the Eemian and the causation.
I don’t think we have to worry about journalists who can’t spot the difference. This is a really big ice core and I for one look forward to what it may tell us, providing it isn’t passed through the AGW filter first.
Bill Tuttle says: ‘You don’t study ice cores to predict the future — you study them to understand the past.’
That’s true, but on the other hand they will find the natural variability triggers at the end of an interglacial. Very exciting times going forward.
What is geography but ones placement on locally shifting tectonic plates.
The ENN article links through to the NEEM website at the Danish Ice and Climate Research Institute.
There’s probably a counterfeit picture there of a section of ice cored from “the last meters” above bedrock. It’s probably counterfeit because such ice would likely contain gasses under such extreme pressure they would explode at normal atmospheric pressure. The caption under one of the pictures of the ice core section proclaims “there are rocks and stuff” in ice within 2 meters of bedrock. The ice core section is completely clear and colored a sort of dullish blue grey.
Extreme northwest Greenland has ice-free surfaces, that’s why Thule Air Base was built there. In some places the snow doesn’t fall enough to replace the melt and there’s exposed ground. Thule is located next to one of the few places where the Greenland icecap can be approached and ascended by land. It’s quite a feat to drill through 2.5 km of ice, but it’s not unprecedented at all and has been done all over Greenland by various groups since the 1950s or so. Some old cores are still housed in ice caves near Thule or Pissifuk.
The slant of the original article was specifically toward finding ancient life at the border between ice and bedrock. With the project name of NEEM I think it’s a fair conclusion that they will find what they are looking for: nematodes and ancient neem trees.