Test post

...just because the View All Userpics page is doing something funky rendering this new icon, and I want to make sure it renders properly in a post.  (Yes, it's based on the animation in one I snagged from yndy.)

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Edit:  I decided it looked better with progressively-appearing, instead of fading-in, text.  I also realized that the first time, I'd edited it in the wrong mode, and thus my text was not anti-aliased.

Fast ice

The Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland drains 8% of the Greenland ice sheet.  In 1998, it approximately doubled the speed at which it is flowing into the ocean, therefore doubling the amount of fresh water it deposits into the North Atlantic.

In the last two years, the Helheim and Kangerdlugssuaq glaciers in eastern Greenland likewise doubled their speeds.  The two glaciers, 300km apart, drain 10% of Greenland's ice sheet between the two of them.  Researchers at the University of Wales in Swansea used satellite observations to determine that at their current speed of around 14km per year, the two glaciers are dumping 100 cubic kilmeters of ice into the ocean every year.

"Three outlet glaciers behaving in a similar way within a few years of each other and after a long period of stability implies both a common cause -- climate change -- and a high probability that other Greenland glaciers will respond likewise."

(Adrian Luckman, Geophysical Research Letters, vol 33, pp L03503)

Loss of the entire Greenland ice sheet would raise global sea levels by around six meters.  The good news is that current estimates indicate we'd have a couple of centuries to prepare for that.  The bad news is we'd be relying on governments to do it (which probably means the US, for one, would be totally unprepared).

A quote from an unlikely source

With regard to Homeland Security, the Bush administration, and its current assertion that criticism of the government is sedition and that protesting the war in Iraq is at best unpatriotic, if not actual terrorism, I offer the following quotation from Hermann Goering, from his testimony during the Nuremberg war trials in 1945:

Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany.  That is understood.  But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.  Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.  That is easy.  All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.  It works the same in any country.