Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumWith +/- 1 Year To Live, Former Astronaut Chooses Front Lines Of Climate, Working In Greenland
Piers Sellers landed in Greenland on a frigid Monday morning in April, and as he stepped off the plane at Thule Air Base he regarded the surrounding snow-covered hills with delight. A former astronaut, six-time spacewalker, and presently the acting director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, Sellers was visiting the country for the first time. I didnt even see this from space, since the farthest north the shuttle goes is fifty-one degrees latitude, he said. Were at seventy-six degrees now, right? Fantastic. Sellerss plan was to rendezvous with NASA researchers at Thule (pronounced TOO-lee) and accompany them on Operation IceBridge, an annual mission to collect data on the diminishing ice in the Arctic Ocean and on the Greenland ice sheet. These guys at IceBridge are always saying, Oh, you should come along, see where the rubber meets the road, and I say that Im too busy, with too much piled on my desk, Sellers explained. But, given my current situation, of all the things that were doing in the field, this one is probably the most critical right now.
By Sellerss current situation, he means the fact that he was recently diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer, a development that he wrote about earlier this year in the Times. After the diagnosis, he briefly considered living his final year or soassuming his doctors expectations prove correctas a rich man might, in a tropical, hedonistic splurge. I thought of myself sitting for weeks on a beach, he said. What would I do? Id be thinking about climate. And I know that Id be thinking about the problem, and thinking about areas that needed to be investigated. All these things would just be going around in my head. Id be sitting on my beach with my margaritaand it would be pointless.
So Sellers went back to his desk job at Goddard, where he oversees the work of about sixteen hundred people, and considered how he could fit a few modest adventures between his office duties and chemotherapy sessions. Soon it occurred to him to go to the Arctic, which is warming faster than any other part of the world. The global temperature has crept up one degree centigrade, but you cant really feel that, Sellers said. But everyone can understand the ice melting. Everyone can see these graphs, and see the shrinkage of the pole, and see that the Greenland ice-sheet loss is just huge. According to data from NASA satellites and airborne missions like IceBridge, Greenland is losing about two hundred and eighty-seven billion metric tons of ice each year. This spring, the ice sheets usual summertime melt began in mid-April, earlier than at any time in recorded history. That was worrisome to Sellers: if even a tenth of the Greenland ice sheet were to fall into the Atlantic, it would raise average global sea levels by about two feet.
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At the moment, Sellers is not sure how things will turn out for humanity. Ive been surprised lately at how quickly and visibly you can see the planet changing, he said. Half my lifetimethirty yearsIve been thinking of this, and Im getting worried about the political response, particularly in this country, where its taken a long time to come around to a consensus. Even if governments around the world manage to reduce their carbon emissions drastically and keep over-all warming to within two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levelsthe goal of last years climate accord in ParisSellers foresees some difficult circumstances for the planet. He pointed to the recent drought in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, which disproportionately affects the poor and drives the regions conflicts. Still, the impacts on the developed world, Sellers said, might be manageable. Now, what if you start creeping up to the hairy end of thingsthe three-degree world? he asked. Well, then weve got surprises. Sellers rattled off the possibilities: intensified droughts, inexorable coastal flooding, severe food shortages. He wouldnt be around to see these events happen, if indeed they came to pass, but his two children, both in their late twenties, might. The risk of political inaction worried him. If youre going to hang around until the Greenland ice sheet falls off into the Atlantic, or one of these big ice shelves becomes unzipped on Antarcticaif you wait for that, by the time that event has taken place, the series of follow-on events that leads you to really bad situations is unstoppable.
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http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/an-astronaut-finds-himself-in-greenland?mbid=social_twitter
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(7,723 posts)cantbeserious
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(2,888 posts)Overseas
(12,121 posts)I stand in awe of this man. Ms Bigmack
hatrack
(59,587 posts)The Institute was one of (if not the) premier botanical and scientific research assets of the Soviet Union and at the time, the largest repository of seeds, rootstocks, cultivars, fruit trees and grains in the world
It was in Leningrad, and was was besieged for more then three years. Something like 750,000 residents died of starvation, disease and bombing/artillery attacks.
The scientists at the Vavilov were responsible for the nation's seedbank - thousands of landraces and varieties of corn, wheat, barley, beans, rye and much more. They could have taken the grain stored on site and used it to feed themselves and their families, or sold it on the black market.
Instead, they held themselves to a higher responsibility - protecting their nation's most valuable stores of crop genetics. By the end of the siege, nine of the scientists who worked at Vavilov had starved to death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov