The SBB building in Bern Wankdorf. The exterior is surrounded by many colored glass bars: as experiment I have tried extrapolating these architectural elements in order to create several abstract images, where preserving and at the same time emphasizing the essence and beauty of the patterns these elements design.

Thanks for watching!

Laurence Smith, chair of geography at University of California, Los Angeles, deploys an autonomous drift boat equipped with several sensors in a meltwater river on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet on July 19, 2015.

 

“Surface melting in Greenland has increased recently, and we lacked a rigorous estimate of the water volumes being produced and their transport,” said Tom Wagner, the cryosphere program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “NASA funds fieldwork like Smith’s because it helps us to interpret satellite data, and to extrapolate measurements from the local field sites to the larger ice sheet."

 

Credit: NASA/Goddard/Jefferson Beck

 

Read more: www.nasa.gov/feature/a-summer-of-nasa-research-on-sea-lev...

 

NASA image use policy.

 

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.

 

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Gyps indicus breeds in south-east Pakistan and peninsular India south of the Gangetic plain, north to Delhi, east through Madhya Pradesh, south to the Nilgiris, and occasionally further south (Collar et al. 2001). The species was first recorded in Nepal in 2011 (Subedi and DeCandido 2013). It was common until very recently, but since the mid-1990s has suffered a catastrophic decline (over 97%) throughout its range. This was first noticed in Keoladeo National Park, India (Prakash et al. 2003), where counts of feeding birds fell from 816 birds in 1985-1986 to just 25 in 1998-1999. Just one tiny population in the Ramanagaram Hills of Karnataka is known to remain in inland southern India, and it is rare elsewhere within its former range (Prakash et al. 2007). Data indicates that the rate of population decline of G. tenuirostris and G. indicus combined has now slowed in India (Prakash et al. 2012).Extensive research has identified the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) diclofenac to be the cause behind this rapid population collapse (Green et al. 2004, Oaks et al. 2004a, Shultz et al. 2004, Swan et al. 2005). This drug, used to treat domestic livestock, is ingested by vultures feeding on their carcasses leading to renal failure causing visceral gout (Oaks et al. 2004a,b; Swan et al. 2005, Gilbert et al. 2006). It is now rare in Pakistan, and although a colony of 200-250 pairs was discovered in 2003 in Sindh Province (A. A. Khan in litt. 2003). In 2007, the total Indian population, based on extrapolations from road transects, was estimated at 45,000 individuals, with a combined average annual decline for this species and G. tenuirostris of over 16% during 2000-2007 (Prakash et al. 2007). It is estimated that its relative abundance in Pakistan declined by 61% between 2003-2004 and 2006-2007, this was followed by a 55% increase by 2007-2008 (Chaudhry et al. 2012).

IUCN

 

Distant View on Bakely Fields aka Grand Paradox du Agricole Autumne

sonzera gordim!

Dallas was the second kitty we looked at when we went to the Cat shelter .. They told us he was unavailable, as someone else had asked the shelter to hold him for them...those people never showed up to take him.. it's their loss!

 

His photo was still up on the site.. so, when they called to remind us to pick up Miles on Sept. 8 TH, I asked if Dallas was available to adopt. The woman said she'd have to ask her boss as someone else had expressed an interest in Dallas. She called back and said we could adopt him! 😊

 

Dallas is living in our house now, and sleeping on the dining room floor at this very moment .... He is our little bundle of joy. We wanted him very badly.. and we got him!

 

Dallas is one of the most gentle, loving little cats you could ever hope to have! He's a joy and he slept on Rod last night when it got cool in the house and Rod had to have a blanket on him... wish I had gotten a photo of this, but I'm going to extrapolate that there will be other photo opportunities for that! 🐈

Last year I decided that I was going to start reading more and I read 255 books. This year, I wanted to up my game a little bit and do more like a reading marathon and ended up the year reading 365 books, a book for every day. Even though I am a pretty athletic person, I can't run because it hurts my knees. I am not as graceful and elegant as I would need to be for professional dance and sports has never interested me. But reading is the one thing I can do and I like to do at the gym, on planes, in bed, and in the bathtub primarily. So, I made an effort to read for a minimum of 2 1/2 hours per day and sometimes ended up reading for more like 4 hours a day on weekends and when I had other days off from work. I didn't read to show off but to escape the reality of our current country's political situation and to learn more about the lives and perspectives of others unlike me. Reading a mixture of novels, nonfiction essays and immigrant stories, collections of poetry and short stories, I read less than 10% of these books by white people and of those 10%, most were by women. I can say that I really enjoyed the vast majority of the books I've read and don't have any significant regrets for this reading marathon.

 

I should also note that, although some of these books did come out in 2019, many did not. The following are my favorite books of this year that I read this year (regardless of their original publication date). I know I am also probably forgetting some and I feel remiss in that too, but I spent hours writing the following (even longer than that reading these) and I hope some of you get some good recommendations of books you might also like to read or can connect with me on a book you have read. Feel free to share your favorites as well! I am highly interested in having conversations about books and finding out about literature I may have had less exposure to living in America.

   

1. Tell Me Who You Are by Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi

 

This book is an astounding work that covers so many different states and personal backgrounds to reflect on race in America. If you like Humans of New York, this is a little like that in the sense that it explores what makes us human but it's a great more complex and thorough than that-maybe a Humans of America. The fact that Guo and Vulchi were able to travel all across the US to gain an understanding of so many people and how their race has affected their lives is a daring and meaningful venture in and of itself but it's also clear that they make a concerted effort to explore the things these people like and enjoy so that there's a fuller sense to some things they have in common with others. In addition, the photographs of these people really add to a sense of them. if you do not fall in love with these humans along with this work as a whole, that is a loss for you. We must change in our country. We must develop more empathy and patience. We must be able to listen to others who we think we share nothing in common with and find the things we do share whilst respecting individual differences. This is the only way we will be able to heal and move forward.

 

This book is a masterpiece and should be celebrated in every household across America.

 

www.chooseorg.org/ournewbook

  

2. Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

 

This book is so relevant to what is happening at the border with the unfair treatment of families from Mexico right now in all of our names but it also manages a personal touch with an extended road trip and the link between the mother/protagonist and her own family and how she handles her own children being separated from her. This is a harrowing read, especially because there is truth in the weight of our names as Americans being tied to the deep sins of mistreating other humans. This is also, however a very poetic read, haunting in its lyrical quality and in the way that Luiselli is able to adeptly convey the range of emotions she feels, desperate and distraught but also so very insightful. You will read these pages wit your heart in your throat, worry that if you are not careful, you may actually end of swallowing it.

 

www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/03/lost-children-archi...

  

3. Frontier by Can Xue

 

2019 was the year I discovered Can Xue, the experimental fiction author from China who, at first, everyone thought was male as her pen name isn't especially gender specific. Can Xue is not understood fully by probably most people and I myself had to read several sentences over again a few times, especially this work, the most esoteric of what I've read (three novels and one short story collection this year). The imagery is especially potent here and you don't really know exactly what is happening in the way the human form can transform. You really don't know quite what could be actually happening....and what could be a dream or a hallucination. This would be a book I would read at the end of the world cuddled under a blanket and remembering the most imaginative humans could be then hoping there were some creatives still left out in the tundra of the world.

 

www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mysterious-fronti...

  

4. Though the Arc of the Rainforest by Karen Tei Yamashita

 

Another new author I discovered was Karen Tei Yamashita and, though I also enjoyed reading a collection of her plays entitled Anime Wong, I even more so enjoyed reading this novel. Yamashita is Japanese American but you get more of that specific perspective from her plays. Set between Japan and Brazil, this novel features a very vivid cast of interesting characters not to mention the protagonist that is the rotating ball in front of the Japanese train conductor's head. This is one of the most unique books I have ever read in my life and it's no surprise that the forward is from one of the most highly intelligent authors in the world, Percival Everett. This novel is a real treat and is a riveting surreal adventure.

 

www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/karen-tei-yamashita-2/...

  

5. Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

 

I've spent many years not knowing very much at all about the lives of those who live in North Korea, much as the citizens of North Korea have spent their lives knowing not too much about others outside of their country. This non fiction work follows the lives of North Koreans who escape into China and South Korea and manage to be granted refugee status and follows them up until the early 2000s. It's another book that disarms you in its brutality. Demick records the stories of their lives, how they bought into propaganda, and how they started to gather inklings of the truth while they were in their home country. The depth of the poverty and brainwashing is immense from the time that these people are schoolchildren. Even if they were starving, if someone came by and saw that their picture of Kim Jong-il then Kim Jong-un weren't immaculate, they could be taken and forced into a labor camp. If they didn't weep loud enough at the death of Kim Jong-il, they were also suspect and no one could trust their neighbors, who could also very likely be government informants. The only media that they had access to was North Korean and Russian propaganda films and even their literature was greatly restricted. In addition, even having a bowl of rice a day was seen as a great luxury. Many starved to death and were happy to have less mouths to feed in their family. The clothing women could wear was also severely limited. This was (and possibly still in many ways is) a super suppressed society (from the point of view of an American especially.) I'd be curious if anything has changed and what but really what honestly struck me is how the government deliberately misled their citizens into thinking that they were producing things they weren't and that the rest of the world was under the same amount of hardship. This is a government who would rather see their people starve than to stoop to accepting aid from abroad. It's eye opening and terrifying for me to think of the people who have suffered and died under these regimes.

 

www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/03/nothing-envy-korea-...

  

6. The Pretty One by Keah Brown

 

There has been a real paucity in literature of valuable and unique human perspectives and this work of nonfiction is an incredibly valuable addition to the canon of literature as a whole and adds to our collective human empathy and understanding of the range of experiences one can have while being alive. Keah Brown is a woman like none other-honest about the world and her own growth as a human, friend, and twin sister, insightful about the racism and ableism in our current present world and humorous in her observations of pop culture. Keah Brown has a different ability level and many might say she has a disability. I say she has an ability that most other people do not possess and may not ever possess. That doesn’t mean that our physical environment does not need to become more accommodating (it does) and that people don’t need to develop more empathy (they do). But, it does mean that we would all be wise to learn from her perspective.

 

keahbrown.com/

 

www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/disabledandcut...

  

7. Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

 

One of the most astounding books of fiction I read this year was a book that feels incredibly brave and is loosely based on actual incidents that happened in the Rodney King riots of LA. Steph Cha is Korean American but it became widely clear from this novel that she is very invested in promoting healing between the Korean and African American communities. The novel goes back and forth between 1991 and 2019 and explores racism with a deep and personal delving that made me literally at times gasp out loud. There’s a question of human accountability, retribution, and these are treated with care and contentiousness. This is the kind of wholly relevant novel we can all learn something from even despite it being technically fiction. There are still lots of truths to be found here.

 

www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/steph-cha/your-house-w...

  

8. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Asha Bandele and Patrisse Khan-Cullors

  

If you live in America and are even remotely aware of the racist systems and acts of violence that are committed against those in the African and African American communities, you should be appalled. I can tell you just reading even what is considered to be “liberal” news outlets I am appalled by how quickly and often they show any mug shot of a person of color but (I always call this correctly), when it’s a white terrorist who has committed a hate crime, we don’t see his face for several days or longer. The fact of the matter is, most of the time these acts are not even classified as terrorism and yet they are just as damaging and politically motivated. This book explores the heartache and mobilization of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as the police brutality and death and the systems in place that keep white people especially profiting. One day, I hope to live in a world where all are treated equally but we have a long ways to go and, as a human of privilege in this current world, I believe the only way we’re going to get there is if all people, including white people, advocate for an end to these racist systems and a place of acceptance, love, and respect for everyone in this world. I’m never going to claim I know the fear and the danger and the distrust that one must feel being Black in America but I do feel extreme sadness when I see cops having no accountability for murder, for profit prisons capitalizing on modern day slavery, and a whole range of racism happening in terms of regentrification, lack of funding for public schools in neighborhoods where there are more people of color, food deserts, and other appalling neglectful practices by our own government. It is shameful. There should be reparations. And, even more so, I do believe that the police in this country are currently doing more harm than good and that we should abolish at least 90% of our prisons. (I’d say abolish all but I want there to still be a place for Trump and all his friends.) This is a must read for all humans who want to come to a better understanding of what it takes to make a movement and the real human damage to what has occurred in several cities across America where the blood on our hands cannot ever be washed off.

 

patrissecullors.com/call-terrorist-black-lives-matter-mem...

  

9. Women Talking by Miriam Toews

 

I’ve read several novels by Miriam Toews and, though I have enjoyed all of them, this is one of her stand alone masterpieces. Miriam Toews comes from a Mennonite perspective and often her stories focus on Mennonite life with some personal anecdotes seemingly inserted here and there. This novel feels much different and offers an important aspect of feminism in terms of exploration of the human female mind after the real life events taking place in Bolivia in 2005-2009 when these women were raped consistently by men in their Mennonite community and were basically told by these men that these abuses were not happening and that these women were psychologically unsound. Most books of this nature explore the deep wounds of being a victim. This book offers a different sort of perspective. While still putting a human face to the damage done by men, it focuses more on the action of these women in discussions and meetings to decide how they will solve this problem going forward. Will they kick out the men? Will they leave completely? If they leave, will they take the children including the male children? At what age does a male stay behind? These are complex and very real questions and all choices are intellectually explored with great discussion. It made me feel the strength and empowerment of women vs. another book that would have focused more on these humans as victims instead. Well worth the read!

 

www.npr.org/2019/04/06/709530968/these-women-talking-buil...

  

10. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

 

This is a daunting read. When I say daunting, I should clarify that while I have read a few 1000+ page novels before, they are usually separated into separate sentences. Ellmann clearly was going for a marathon level of stream of consciousness when she wrote this one. Most of the novel (I’d say 900+ pages of it) are The fact of___ the fact of______ the fact of____ the fact of___ and Ellmann reveals what haunts her the most-Trump and corporations valuing profit over people, gun toting MAGA white terrorists on the loose, poorly built bridges, cops shooting unarmed African Americans, and sort of what I can only say I would consider the collective disease process of being American in this present day. But, there is also the overarching story line of being a mother, a daughter whose mother has passed away of Cancer, remarrying after divorce, and oddly enough being a pie baker. She goes through several harrowing real life incidents in the book where she and her family are put in danger but that doesn’t give us a break from her very loud internal monologue that will suddenly just start listing off facts of films, every city she can think of, and random products. The reader’s only reprieve from this great feat of literature is when we see the perspective of a lioness running from hunters and trying to protect her progeny. I do think this book is worth reading, especially if you can get in the groove and feel the pulse of the first person female protagonist but you do need to obviously put in a huge time and emotional commitment. In order to help things flow more smoothly for you if you decide to take up this challenge as a reader, I suggest reading about 100 pages for 11 days straight or 50 pages a day for 21 days straight. If you do this, you manage to get into a certain groove by page 300 or so. Slowly but surely, all the tangential word salad starts making a weird sort of sense and you begin to really feel for the sense of this woman’s personal story and what she’s going through. Maybe it says something about me that I found her relatable even though I haven’t lost my mom to Cancer, haven’t gone through a divorce, do not have kids, and don’t have a clue how to bake a pie. But, I understand being caught in a state of almost helplessness about what my country has become and what I witness in terms of how people act towards each other. Anyway, a lot of people have abandoned this but it might be the perfect book to add to the next time capsule. Hopefully, things will get better in the new year.

 

www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/can-one-sentence-capt...

  

11. In the Country We Love: My Family Divided by Diane Guerrero

 

I still haven’t watched the show Orange is the New Black, which stars Diane Guerrero, but I fell in love with her as Jane the Virgin’s good friend/sidekick Lina early on. (You can’t NOT watch Jane the Virgin if you live in Chicago. So many of my co-workers went to high school with Gina Rodriguez and always talk about how nice she was to everyone which is literally the opposite of what most people say about you in high school). That being said, I usually don’t read books just because they are by celebrities but I enjoyed this one as well as America Ferrera’s American Like Me: Reflections of Life Between Cultures and Tiffany Haddish’s The Last Black Unicorn. All three nonfiction autobiographies are worth reading and pondering over but Guerrero’s personal struggle against adversity when she literally came home as a teenager and found herself completely alone after her parents had been deported to Colombia struck a real sense in me of how, first it’s gotten even worse with ICE raids, and second, these children are such victims and we’re not even considering all the collateral human damage of what we do as a country when this happens. I found this autobiography brave, brutally honest, and even at times a little funny but mostly I found this to me about the power of perseverance and not giving up no matter what, not just in the struggle for survival, which was very real for Guerrero, but also in the struggle to do what you love and follow your dreams and actually make it. Guerrero is talented, that is for sure, but she is also a sort of superhero as well in what she has overcome and she has given us all a real gift of letting us glimpse the power of her human spirit.

 

www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/diane-guerrero/in-the-...

  

12. A Particular Type of Black Man by Tope Folarin

 

This is a complex portrait of a Nigerian family who immigrates to Utah of all places and it seems like some of this story must be based on Folarin’s own life experience in that he did have a family who immigrated here from Nigeria and spent some time growing up in Utah and other areas that are also mentioned in this book. What makes this book more unique than many immigrant fiction or pseudofiction is the exploration of the human mind and exploration of mental health and illness within the protagonist as well as this family unit. What also makes it worth reading is the sense of a celebration in Nigerian culture vs. complete desertion. There were insights and information in this book that really astounded me, even having lived in this country all my life (though, to be fair I have never been to Utah). Well worth the read!

 

www.npr.org/2019/08/24/751917486/tope-folarin-was-a-parti...

  

13. The Memory Police by Yoko Agawa

 

This is the second full length novel I’ve read by Yoko Agawa (I’ve also read and liked The Housekeeper and the Professor as well as her short story collection entitled Revenge). I enjoyed all three of these works but I liked The Memory Police by far the best…the concept that you slowly lose the memory of everything around you and hold dear and the including literally parts of yourself-limbs, for instance, and that anyone who still has the ability to remember is not safe but is taken and separated from society at the very least is a really intriguing concept but where the book really succeeds is in its exploration of memories in the sense that they make us human and are truly a part of us. It’s also a book within a book as we experience this cruel postmodern society from the protagonist while, at the same time, experience her own protagonist of the horror typewriter story she’s been authoring. I really enjoyed the strong sense of mood and contemplation on the nature of existence.

 

www.npr.org/2019/08/12/749538789/quiet-surreal-drama-and-...

  

14. Revolution Sunday by Wendy Guerra

 

This is a mixed sort of book between prose and poetry with some aspects of experimental fiction as well. One cannot help but fall in love a little bit with Guerra as she travels to Mexico, falls in love with an actor, tries to escape persecution from the Cuban government who are constantly monitoring every move she makes, and above all keeps writing as she attempts to discover the truth of the death of her parents as well as gain a sense of her place in the world as a woman, a poet, a human. Some of these lines of poetry are completely haunting and there’s some real themes in this novel about deconstruction and reconstruction.

 

www.npr.org/2018/12/05/673387723/complicated-challenging-...

 

www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/books/review/wendy-guerra-revo...

  

15. The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri

 

Lefteri is British but has worked with immigrants in Athens, which is where this story takes place at least in part. This is a really harrowing fictional account of a Syrian husband and wife who have lost their child and are each coping with it in their own ways (the mother soon after goes blind and the father suffers from delusions and hallucinations). This is also a story about the struggle for survival after witnessing the tragedy-the destruction of your home and everything you love, and the process of immigration to a safer space and country and the real life troubles to be found in these places as well. Oddly enough, I also learned a great deal about bees from this book but I still feel it is more focused on the desperation that people in Syria must feel and trying to get over incidents that have devastated them and should have never happened in the first place. On a personal level, I don’t believe in borders and I’d rather have more Syrians in my own country than horrible rich white men. No thanks!

 

www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/beekeeper-aleppo-novel

  

16. Those Who Wander: America's Lost Street Kids by Vivian Ho

 

America is a country of great wealth but, unfortunately, until our tax structure changes, it is a wealth owned by the very few whose greed is overpowering (I mean, everyone needs a 100th house while the homeless are dying on the streets, right). In California, especially the Bay Area, where this nonfiction work concentrates on, this is even more vividly so. The book explores the reasons behind actual murders that took place but also the desperate conditions that drive people to become homeless, the psychologies behind being homeless, and the resources that are available and kind people who have tried to help. This book is a really difficult read because of the subject matter but it is important that none of us look away and turn our backs on those who struggle. No one should have to live in poverty just so the most affluent people can become more powerful. But, of course, these uber rich are miserable too, you know. They too won’t be free until every other human is free.

 

www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/vivian-ho/those-who-wa...

   

18. So You Want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Oluo

 

Oluo is incredible candid and honest not just about racism within our structures such as our for profit prison industrial system but within our daily interactions. She answers some questions white people might be too scared to answer and illuminates other things white people might be oblivious about in terms of their/our own sense of privilege. And she does all of this, I’m guess, with the hope that speaking truth to power will lead us all to be better people regardless of our race and also because communities have suffered because in 2019 (now 2020), white privilege is still very much a thing and is going strong.

 

www.thenationalbookreview.com/features/2018/2/1/pzq0lfjcp...

  

19. Logic in an Illogical World by Eugenia Cheng

 

I wouldn’t call myself a Mathematician by any standards. I can do basic algebra without a calculator and I see the artistic nature of geometry and can read and extrapolate from a variety of graphs but, most of the time, I still prefer art, literature, and music to Mathematics. Still, the one time I became really and truly excited about Math happened when I leared about Mathematical/Logical proofs and Cheng explores the art of proofs within the context of several political arguments relevant to this period of time in our shared human history. She touches on the less controversial to the extreme controversial and offers insights into personality and how she herself has changed when she has thought of an argument or a collection of facts in a different context. This book will help you see multiple points of view and have richer discussions about everything from mandatory voting practices to abortion.

 

www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/19/the-art-of-logic-by...

  

20. Making Comics by Lynda Barry

 

Many of the books I have written about have touched me and I have learned a great deal from them but this is one of those books that gave me very concrete ideas about activities to do with children at Chicago Public Schools. Not all of these activities are written to be done with children but many can be adapted and I have found that giving kids a 4-5 minute free draw at the end of my Occupational Therapy sessions not only motivates them to complete other challenges but also addresses a visual motor need they might have. I have really enjoyed tremendously seeing kids draw their favorite monster and also as themselves as an animal in particular. I think drawing can definitely be like dreams….you never truly know exactly what you are thinking and feeling until you let your mind and your hands go across the paper. This book also inspired me in a different way, which is to look at my own drawings not as technically good or bad but as a product of my own mind and spirit and, in that sense, it’s less damaging to me and less frustrating when I can’t draw something exactly how it looks in real life, for example. I loved all the exercises and visual examples in this book! It really can change your life if you let it!

 

www.npr.org/2019/11/27/782921983/cartoonist-lynda-barry-d...

 

21. Blue Boy by Rakesh Satyal

 

I have to admit, I fell in love with the protagonist of this story, Kiran Sharma, who identifies with the deity of Krishna and is trying to find how own way in the world as both a boy who is discovering his own sexuality and the fact that he is gay, as well as a young man coming to terms with his identity as an Indian American boy living in middle America (Cincinnati, Ohio). Kiran is dramatic and perfect and Satyal really succeeds in painting a vivid portrait of growing up with obstacles but still being yourself despite these challenges. There were scenes in this book that made me laugh until I cried but also made me cry until I laughed. Wonderfully written with a true celebration of the human spirit and of the joy in being able to be yourself and learn to love everything that makes you: you!

 

www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/fiction/06/08/blue-boy-by-...

  

22. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous By Ocean Vuong

  

First and foremost, Ocean Vuong is a poet and even in prose this comes out more than the vast majority of novel writers. This is his first actual work of fiction and feels a little traumatic and haunting it it’s deep feeling sense of the experience of life and family. Vuong’s deep feeling protagonist is trying to come to terms with the actions of and his relationship to his mother as well as some of his own life choices. You get the sense that each day brings its own struggles and is definitely not easy and that reality is a cruel sort of mistress that keeps revisiting him. But, the poetry above all will make you remember and want to return to this book.

 

www.npr.org/2019/06/05/729691730/on-earth-is-gorgeous-all...

  

23. A Woman is No Man By Etaf Rum

 

This book is about many things-family, tradition, but also feminism and a new generation of women who think and reach beyond their metaphysical borders. It follows three generations of a family who immigrated to Brooklyn from Palestine and the abuses they suffered at the hands of their men as well as the secrets they covered up. Most devastating is the way that the grandmother and mother expect (though much more so the grandmother) the conforming of the younger women to submit to all the male wishes and hide any evidence of their true selves that might appear ungrateful and difficult. This is a family that would rather kill than be seen as dishonorable and, though it is technically fiction, it is shocking in the depth of abuse these women take and how they themselves as humans are taken for granted. This book was full of surprises for me on virtually every page.

 

www.npr.org/2019/03/02/699051434/for-better-or-worse-new-...

  

24. Broken Places and Outer Spaces Nnedi Okorafor

 

I’m a big fan of the science fiction of Nnedi Okorafor, most notably Lagoon is my favorite, but this book is one I read this year and is a highly personal autobiographical account of her learning to break free from paralysis after a Scoliosis surgery that did not go as well as expected and finding her own unique voice and inspiration in the work of other artists to explore her own realm of Science Fiction in a way that is wholly worthwhile. I had no idea that the author I’ve read so many fiction books from had this extreme experience but I was indeed inspired by her own perseverance and coming to terms with the surgery and not letting limitations define her but pushing beyond these with a strength and dedication that doubtless has made her one of the very best authors in her field.

 

nnedi.com/books/broken_places_outer_spaces.html

  

25. John Edgar Wideman: Fanon

 

This is one of the more complex books of fiction I’ve read this year…it is truly a story within a story within a story based on some of Wideman’s real life with his brother as well as the actual life of the revolutionary Frantz Fanon..it’s about not wanting the cruelty of history to be repeated and about drawing connections between timelines and the way racism continues to impact people across continents today. It is at times highly poetic and at other times so visceral you might have to put it down but in any case very worthwhile reading and incredibly adept and masterful in its exploration of all of these connections and reconciliation between past and present with a hope for a better and different future. There are many passages here that are profound and all are thought provoking.

  

www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/books/review/Siegel-t.html

  

26. The Hungry Ghosts by Shyam Selvadurai

 

I have learned a great deal about the political crisis in Sri Lanka in the 1980s from Selvadurai. If you want to try to understand what was happening between the Tamil and Sinhalese people, this is a topic that Selvadurai visits often as well as coming of age as a man who is gay and being an immigrant in Canada. There’s also a real delving into the classism inherent within the Sri Lankan society between these people and also, between the protagonist’s own grandmother and her tenants and the abuse and neglect that happens to the poor. Meanwhile, the grandmother manages to distance herself from her actions and convince herself that these people brought these things on themselves with bad karma…by her own standards, she should expect a much worse life in her next one. There are many similar topics in terms of Sri Lankan politics and coming to terms with one’s own sexuality in Funny Boy but this seemed more of an in depth work so I would recommend reading The Hungry Ghosts if you have limited reading time but you may find you’d like to read his others anyhow.

  

nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/book-reviews/book-re...

  

27. Taina by Ernesto Quinonez

 

I read two of Quinonez’s novels back to back and while I liked the emotional drama and complexity of Bodega Dreams, I really liked the sense of Puerto Rican tradition and strong female main character here. This involves everything from the idea of magical realism to deep religious beliefs. Could Taina be a postmodern virgin Mary? Could this be immaculate conception? The other protagonist, a young male, is willing to believe anything she says and fight for her virtue. While this story takes place primarily in Spanish Harlem, it also shows the inherent racism and classism in NYC as a whole while adeptly pulling one into the personalities and tribulations of the characters. Well worth reading!

 

apnews.com/f8209640f0554191a893cbe61a4583b9

  

28. On Black Sisters Street Chika Unigwe

 

This book explores the lives of African women immigrating to Belgium in hopes of a better life and being lied to with the idea that they could be housekeepers and nannies but then are sold into a sex trade where they are basically enslaved until they raise an inordinate amount of money to “pay back” their immigration fee. It is about living unsafely as an illegal and being forced into prostitution just to survive, which happens far more frequently than many people might realize. Women on our own are valuable in terms of our ideas and our empathy but the world will still look at women as a whole and women from African especially as only worthwhile as a body to rape. This is a very difficult read, mainly because of the aspects of truth that this happens but also because you get attached to the characters and don’t want them to suffer, which is the work of a great novelist in and of itself.

 

www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/books/review/book-review-on-bl...

  

29. Home a Refugee Story by Abu Bakr al Rabeeah

 

This is a really insightful read for anyone who is looking to hear about the author’s escape from Syria to refugees in Canada. We learn a lot about the power of the human spirit and it is also in many ways a testament to why all countries should welcome refugees. It is also valuable in terms of giving ideas on how we can do better in terms of supporting the transition between countries when there is a new language, culture shock, and when families need to keep something similar in place such as even a space to pray in schools. We need to all make sure we are being kind and sensitive and welcoming as well as aware of the probably trauma that refugees have suffered, especially coming from war torn countries. This also shows us how valuable it is to listen and to help refugees tell their stories, as the work of Rabeeah’s Language Arts teacher Winnie Yeung is the reason why we have this remarkable autobiography.

 

quillandquire.com/review/homes-a-refugee-story/

  

30. The Other Americans by Laila Lalami

 

There were many times reading this book I felt fascinated, wondered about the choices of the characters and what they would do next, and drawn to the mystery surrounding the death that unites all of them from the beginning of the Moroccan American father who owns a restaurant and is suspiciously killed by a hit and run. This is a work of fiction but the way it explores racism and xenophobia is all too real and Lalami really helps the reader sense the loss of humanity when incidents like this take place as well as the complexity of it between the investigation and trial and the level of dishonesty too. It’s also interesting because it involves an unlikely inter-racial love affair and there’s a sense that when these two people can fall in love, maybe we can all reconcile our differences with each other…maybe….hopefully we are capable.

  

www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-lailalalami-otheramericans...

  

31. The Making of a Dream: How a Group of Young Undocumented Immigrants Helped Change What It Means to Be American By, Laura Wides Munoz

 

This is a really comprehensive work of nonfiction chronicling the 1,500 walk of a group of Dreamers and a decade of work beginning with Obama and coming up to the published date of January 2019. It makes no qualms about exposing the frustrations and stalemate of the Obama presidency in getting protections but also the horrors of our current political situation for these young and determined humans that are also vulnerable despite their bravery and fierceness. We get to know the inner workings of their lives and family situations, their education and history of what drives them the most in terms of their advocacy. Munoz also exposes how some movements such as gay rights and marriage are pitted against others like the movement to protect Dreamers and how a single year cut off can arbitrary ruin human lives and mean deportations. This is an important read for anyone who still thinks these amazing humans don’t belong or deserve to be here (They do!) and who still thinks it’s easy to become a legal immigrant if you’re just willing to go through the established process….this line of thinking is an ignorant myth. These humans deserve so much more than this. Let’s hope 2020 brings us a new president who is willing to provide more protections and also welcome more immigrants to America.

 

www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/books/review/laura-wides-munoz...

  

32. Go Ahead in the Rain by Hanif Abdurraquib

 

Hanif always brings himself into his writing about music and this is why, even if you are not the biggest Tribe Called Quest Fan, you will still find many reasons to fall in love with this book. That being said, my partner has always loved Tribe and I finally fell in love myself when I saw them perform and was able to photograph them (see: www.flickr.com/photos/kirstiecat/35348763944/in/photolist... ) Hanif made me love both him and the band even more in the way that he explores their history, why their music is groundbreaking, and their contemporaries as well. Hanif also explores his own love of music and how music was seen in his family. There’s also a story early on that shows the racism of his music teacher at school that made me feel so devastated that these things happen from teachers who are supposed to be loving and nonjudgmental. There is so much to love and learn from in this book and, even if you don’t fall in love with Tribe, you might still fall deeper in love with humanity and our relationship to nourishing sound.

 

www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/10/go-ahead-in-the-rai...

 

33. Call Me American Abdi Nor Iftin

 

Oh my God the lengths that this man goes to in order to survive civil war in Somalia, escape to Kenya then to the US is insane. My heart was in my throat for the vast majority of this book…a really survival against all odds life story. It also gives a glimpse at how much tragedy some of our immigrants are carrying with them when they come here and the love and supports we should all give them. Abdi Nor Iftin is extremely intelligent and also funny but I can’t imagine going through even 10% of what he went through when he was trying to escape warring tribes and seeing so much death around him and still being able to lift my head off the pillow each morning.

 

www.nytimes.com/2018/07/15/books/call-me-american-abdi-no...

  

34. Passing by Nella Larsen

 

I read both Passing and Quicksand by Nella Larsen this year and liked them both quite a bit. Both have a lot to offer in terms of insights into classism and racism but Passing feels a little more vivid to me maybe because it is set between Chicago and NYC whereas much of Quicksand takes place in Denmark. Both novels are well worth reading though and Passing has both a personal component between these two women with a shared history and that of secrets and racism as one woman is passing for white in trade of an elevated place in society at the time. In addition to giving us glimpses of both cities in 1929, it shows a little bit about what it was like both living as a white woman and living as a black woman and the level of anxiety felt by those who tried to keep their race a secret.

 

electricliterature.com/in-nella-larsens-passing-whiteness...

  

35. Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card Sara Saedi

 

In many ways, this is about a family torn because of their differing immigration statuses and how arbitrary all that seems when we’re talking about real humans and not just letters and numbers on a page. This is a family that will go to all lengths in order to get citizenship for themselves and others and will fight to be Americans even though America does not treat them as kindly or with justice. This is also a great deal about the joys of family, of Iranian culture, and also of coming of age and pop culture in America. Saedi, who now writes for iZombie (I still haven’t seen this show myself but now I might give it a try), is at times poignant and at other times really hilarious. You really get a sense of her personality in this autobiography and it really makes you again realize how much immigrants have to offer America and how they deserve far better than what they are given most of the time. It’s a tragedy that we treat humans the way we do simply because they aren’t born here. That needs to stop.

 

www.npr.org/2018/03/28/597600898/americanized-recounts-wh...

 

36. Lindy West: The Witches are Coming

 

Lindy West is hilarious in her examination of racism, sexism, whole bodyism and all that really needs to change about reality. I learned things I somehow missed, like how “Grumpy Cat’s” owners came up with a ridiculous far fetched story so cover up for the fact they were using an insult/slur used for those with different ability levels. I also found the chapters about Adam Sandler and Joan Rivers pretty insightful as well. There were many times I felt like, “Yeah, I agree with that” but she has a really great cutting way about how she presents information and also her opinions that make it a good read.

 

www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/lindy-west-casts...

 

37. The Reactive By, Ntshanga, Masande

 

I’ve never read a book quite like this. If you want to know what it was like to be HIV+ in the late 1990s-early 2000s and living in South Africa, this book is the one for you. But also, this book is about family, about overcoming loss, about deep friendships and has a great deal of existentialism and in general bizarre interactions, drug trial and substance abuse, and an analysis of racism in Cape Town as well. I felt very strongly that I both learned something and gained an attachment to these fictional characters and what they were going through.

 

slate.com/culture/2016/07/masande-ntshangas-the-reactive-...

  

38. Brother by David Chariandy

 

Set in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, this follows second generation Trinidadian immigrants and the racism they encounter living there in the early 1990s. This is a really well written look at family, especially these two brothers and the bond between them and how the family deals with all of life’s small and large tragedies. It’s also a book that will likely devastate you, though I don’t want to spoil anything by saying more.

 

www.cbc.ca/books/brother-by-david-chariandy-1.4246382

  

39. A People’s History of Heaven by Mathangi Subramanian

 

This could be another book about class warfare and profit over people but the layers in it are exceptional and what Subramanian does really well is to delve into the different personalities and power in the women in this place ironically called Heaven and illustrate the need for women to stick together.

 

www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/books/review/mathangi-subraman...

 

40. Dinner By, César Aira

 

I read a couple of novels/novellas by César Aira and a collection of short stories called The Musical Brain and Other Stories, which was also phenomenal. Dinner was even more unexpected and hilarious because it combines the need to be remembered and the power of names with a zombie uprising in the little town of Pringles in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I love the politically astute sense to this and the twists in the plot. Really a very unique book not just about zombies but about the power of human memory.

 

www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/cesar-aira/dinner-aira/

  

A couple of really highly recommended books of poetry:

 

The City in Which I Love You Li-Young Lee

 

Rangoli by Pavana Reddy

  

A couple of quick cat related books

 

I don’t think the following books are necessarily life changing but I did want to mention to them in case you are a cat lover like I am! I think animals bring out the best in humans when we find ourselves at our most compassionate and so I’ve always enjoyed reading books that feature cats. Here are the couple I read this year and enjoyed:

 

If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura

 

We could give up movies and time but could we give up cats? What if we were terminally ill and this could buy us one more day on Earth….what would we give up?

  

The Traveling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa

 

For the vast majority of this book, we really don’t know why the protagonist is looking for someone to take care of his cat but we get to meet a lot of different types of people from his past and learn about them, which is both interesting and philosophical.

 

Extrapolation

Artist: Liliane Lijn (b.1939)

Date: 1982

Material: Stainless steel

Location: Behind the UEA Central Library

Object number: L.08

On long loan from Norfolk County Council

 

Lijn compared these ascending steel plates to the pages of a book as the sculpture was created for the Norwich Central Library. Lijn often works with materials that reflect or refract light.

Like a scene from the 2023 Apple TV drama series, Extrapolations, this is 10:52 a.m. on September 9, 2020, and wildfire smoke stains the sky and blocks the sun in San Francisco.

I really liked the look of this shot, the scene, colors, perspective at 16mm and details.

 

Shot handheld on Sony a7Rii with Sony Zeiss 16-35mm f4.0. The fine details are all crisp handheld unlike what I get with my D800E.

 

The new Sony 16-35mm f2.8 GM is by most consensus class leading, latest and greatest. A mere 160gms heavier but doubled the price of the f4 version.

 

Quite a number have upgraded judging from the number of the 2+ years older f4 version being put up for sale.

 

A lens at this focal range is largely a landscape lens, typically shot stopped down at around f8. At such an aperture, there is little perceptible difference between the f4 and f2.8 versions of the Sony options.

 

Of course we can't make the same extrapolation like this for all lenses because a lot of lenses can be middling and never catch up even beyond f8. Be informed and decide wisely.

  

On another experimental foray, but with 35mm Arista and use of Rodinal followed by Xtol. Not alot of experience using this film with different developers so had to do some extrapolation. Unfortunately, freezing rain, overcast skies, and temps below 20 degrees F made it more challenging. I did appreciate more sharpness with this combo, but can't really tell about dynamic range given the blah weather. Thanks for the continued inspiration from my fellow flickeranians. Be safe out there.

OMG... making 365 new photos a year is very difficult! I've been doing it for the past few years, and I hope I haven't made it look to easy... I promise I'm not pulling a "Scotty in Engineering", where I'm complaining about something that is actually pretty easy. But sometimes, I yell, "The ship's breaking apart captain!" -- and I really mean it! hehe...

 

My next task with all these London photos is to go back and geotag the dang things. It's never-ending... the to-do list, you know. I wish we were about 3+ years down the road when there was some smart-web-service that could look at the composition and then auto-geotag. BTW, if you're into digital imaging and computer science, there is a million dollar business for you... extrapolate the location information and auto-geo-tag. People like me would love you and pay decent money for the service! :)

 

- Trey Ratcliff

 

Read more and see a new video here at the Stuck in Customs blog.

This arch is located in the Devil's Garden section of Arches National Park near Moab, Utah and is the largest spanning arch in the world at 290 feet. I got a little lucky with this shot. I had seen shots of sunbursts at this location in the past but they were from directly underneath the arch before that area was closed off when a chunk of the arch fell off back in 1991. Finally, I saw an image shot by Colorado photographer Glenn Randall taken from the vantage point of the current viewing area and he graciously offered up both the time of year and day of his sunburst capture (a rarity among photographers). The problem was that his shot took place some six weeks later so I'd have to extrapolate the time of day from that. I figured either I'd have to spend an entire afternoon at the arch or possibly just visit 2 or 3 times before I'd hit it right. With an initial guess in hand I hiked out to the arch (it's only a mile hike each way on the Devil's Garden trail) and arrived to see the sun just about ready to intersect with it. What fortuitous timing!!

 

This image also marks my first experience using Photomatix's relatively new Exposure Fusion feature to achieve the three image blend you see above. I've never been a fan of HDR and have always preferred to do my blends using layer masks in photoshop in the past. Well, Exposure Fusion may change all that! The resulting blend was effortless and very natural looking to my eye. I would have spent far longer to come up with something similar using layer masks. I can't wait to start using this on other blends to see how well it works under a variety of situations. It's definitely found a home in my post-processing toolkit!

 

You can read more about my winter trip to the Moab area in this blog entry

 

View on Black

 

To purchase prints or view my full image collection, check out my Explore The Light Photography website.

Sea level drop refers to the phenomenon in which melting glaciers cause the surrounding land to rise.. Between 1901 and 2018, the average global sea level rose by 15–25 cm (6–10 in), or an average of 1–2 mm per year. This rate accelerated to 4.62 mm/yr for the decade 2013–2022.[3] Climate change due to human activities is the main cause. Between 1993 and 2018, thermal expansion of water accounted for 42% of sea level rise. Melting temperate glaciers accounted for 21%, with Greenland accounting for 15% and Antarctica 8%.: 1576  Sea level rise lags changes in the Earth's temperature. So sea level rise will continue to accelerate between now and 2050 in response to warming that is already happening. What happens after that will depend on what happens with human greenhouse gas emissions. Sea level rise may slow down between 2050 and 2100 if there are deep cuts in emissions. It could then reach a little over 30 cm (1 ft) from now by 2100. With high emissions it may accelerate. It could rise by 1 m (3+1⁄2 ft) or even 2 m (6+1⁄2 ft) by then.[6][7] In the long run, sea level rise would amount to 2–3 m (7–10 ft) over the next 2000 years if warming amounts to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F). It would be 19–22 metres (62–72 ft) if warming peaks at 5 °C (9.0 °F): 21  meters. Rising seas ultimately impact every coastal and island population on Earth. This can be through flooding, higher storm surges, king tides, and tsunamis. These have many knock-on effects. They lead to loss of coastal ecosystems like mangroves. Crop production falls because of salinization of irrigation water and damage to ports disrupts sea trade. The sea level rise projected by 2050 will expose places currently inhabited by tens of millions of people to annual flooding. Without a sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, this may increase to hundreds of millions in the latter decades of the century. Areas not directly exposed to rising sea levels could be affected by large scale migrations and economic disruption. At the same time, local factors like tidal range or land subsidence, as well as the varying resilience and adaptive capacity of individual ecosystems, sectors, and countries will greatly affect the severity of impacts. For instance, sea level rise along the United States (particularly along the US East Coast) is already higher than the global average, and it is expected to be 2 to 3 times greater than the global average by the end of the century. Yet, out of the 20 countries with the greatest exposure to sea level rise, 12 are in Asia. Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam collectively account for 70% of the global population exposed to sea level rise and land subsidence. Finally, the greatest near-term impact on human populations will occur in the low-lying Caribbean and Pacific islands—many of those would be rendered uninhabitable by sea level rise later this century.

Societies can adapt to sea level rise in three ways: by managed retreat, by accommodating coastal change, or by protecting against sea level rise through hard-construction practices like seawalls or soft approaches such as dune rehabilitation and beach nourishment. Sometimes these adaptation strategies go hand in hand; at other times choices must be made among different strategies. A managed retreat strategy is difficult if an area's population is quickly increasing: this is a particularly acute problem for Africa, where the population of low-lying coastal areas is projected to increase by around 100 million people within the next 40 years. Poorer nations may also struggle to implement the same approaches to adapt to sea level rise as richer states, and sea level rise at some locations may be compounded by other environmental issues, such as subsidence in so-called sinking cities. Coastal ecosystems typically adapt to rising sea levels by moving inland; but may not always be able to do so, due to natural or artificial barriers. Between 1901 and 2018, the global mean sea level rose by about 20 cm (or 8 inches). More precise data gathered from satellite radar measurements found a rise of 7.5 cm (3 in) from 1993 to 2017 (average of 2.9 mm/yr), accelerating to 4.62 mm/yr for the decade 2013–2022.

Regional variations: Sea level rise is not uniform around the globe. Some land masses are moving up or down as a consequence of subsidence (land sinking or settling) or post-glacial rebound (land rising due to the loss of weight from ice melt). Therefore, local relative sea level rise may be higher or lower than the global average. Gravitational effects of changing ice masses also add to differences in the distribution of sea water around the globe. When a glacier or an ice sheet melts, the loss of mass reduces its gravitational pull. In some places near current and former glaciers and ice sheets, this has caused local water levels to drop, even as the water levels will increase more than average further away from the ice sheet. Consequently, ice loss in Greenland has a different fingerprint on regional sea level than the equivalent loss in Antarctica. On the other hand, the Atlantic is warming at a faster pace than the Pacific. This has consequences for Europe and the U.S. East Coast, which receives a sea level rise 3–4 times the global average. The downturn of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) has been also tied to extreme regional sea level rise on the US Northeast Coast. Many ports, urban conglomerations, and agricultural regions are built on river deltas, where subsidence of land contributes to a substantially increased relative sea level rise. This is caused by both unsustainable extraction of groundwater and oil and gas, as well as by levees and other flood management practices preventing the accumulation of sediments which otherwise compensates for the natural settling of deltaic soils, over 3 m (10 ft) in urban areas of the Mississippi River Delta (New Orleans), and over 9 m (30 ft) in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta.  On the other hand, post-glacial isostatic rebound causes relative sea level fall around the Hudson Bay in Canada and the northern Baltic.

Projections: A comparison of SLR in six parts of the US. The Gulf Coast and East Coast see the most SLR, whereas the West Coast the least NOAA predicts different levels of sea level rise through 2050 for several US coastlines. There are two complementary ways of modeling sea level rise and making future projections. In the first approach, scientists use process-based modeling, where all relevant and well-understood physical processes are included in a global physical model. An ice-sheet model is used to calculate the contributions of ice sheets and a general circulation model is used to compute the rising sea temperature and its expansion. While some of the relevant processes may be insufficiently understood, this approach can predict non-linearities and long delays in the response, which studies of the recent past will miss. In the other approach, scientists employ semi-empirical techniques using historical geological data to determine likely sea level responses to a warming world, in addition to some basic physical modeling. These semi-empirical sea level models rely on statistical techniques, using relationships between observed past contributions to global mean sea level and global mean temperature. This type of modeling was partially motivated by most physical models in previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) literature assessments having underestimated the amount of sea level rise compared to observations of the 20th century.

Projections for the 21st century: Historical sea level reconstruction and projections up to 2100 published in 2017 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.[35] RCPs are different scenarios for future concentrations of greenhouse gases. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides multiple plausible scenarios of 21st century sea level rise in each report, starting from the IPCC First Assessment Report in 1990. The differences between scenarios are primarily due to the uncertainty about future greenhouse gas emissions, which are subject to hard to predict political action, as well as economic developments. The scenarios used in the 2013-2014 Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) were called Representative Concentration Pathways, or RCPs. An estimate for sea level rise is given with each RCP, presented as a range with a lower and upper limit, to reflect the unknowns. The RCP2.6 pathway would see GHG emissions kept low enough to meet the Paris climate agreement goal of limiting warming by 2100 to 2 °C. Estimated SLR by 2100 for RCP2.6 was about 44 cm (the range given was as 28–61 cm). For RCP8.5 the sea level would rise between 52 and 98 cm (20+1⁄2 and 38+1⁄2 in). A set of older estimates of sea level rise. Sources showed a wide range of estimates

Sea level rise projections for the years 2030, 2050 and 2100

The report did not estimate the possibility of global SLR being accelerated by the outright collapse of the marine-based parts of the Antarctic ice sheet, due to the lack of reliable information, only stating with medium confidence that if such a collapse occurred, it would not add more than several tens of centimeters to 21st century sea level rise. Since its publication, multiple papers have questioned this decision and presented higher estimates of SLR after attempting to better incorporate ice sheet processes in Antarctica and Greenland and to compare the current events with the paleoclimate data. For instance, a 2017 study from the University of Melbourne researchers estimated that ice sheet processes would increase AR5 sea level rise estimate for the low emission scenario by about one quarter, but they would add nearly half under the moderate scenario and practically double estimated sea level rise under the high emission scenario. The 2017 Fourth United States National Climate Assessment presented estimates comparable to the IPCC for the low emission scenarios, yet found that the SLR of up to 2.4 m (10 ft) by 2100 relative to 2000 is physically possible if the high emission scenario triggers Antarctic ice sheet instability, greatly increasing the 130 cm (5 ft) estimate for the same scenario but without instability. A 2016 study led by Jim Hansen presented a hypothesis of vulnerable ice sheet collapse leading to near-term exponential sea level rise acceleration, with a doubling time of 10, 20 or 40 years, thus leading to multi-meter sea level rise in 50, 100 or 200 years, respectively. However, it remains a minority view amongst the scientific community. For comparison, two expert elicitation papers were published in 2019 and 2020, both looking at low and high emission scenarios. The former combined the projections of 22 ice sheet experts to estimate the median SLR of 30 cm (12 in) by 2050 and 70 cm (27+1⁄2 in) by 2100 in the low emission scenario and the median of 34 cm (13+1⁄2 in) by 2050 and 110 cm (43+1⁄2 in) by 2100 in a high emission scenario. They also estimated a small chance of sea levels exceeding 1 meter by 2100 even in the low emission scenario and of going beyond 2 meters in the high emission scenario, with the latter causing the displacement of 187 million people. The other paper surveyed 106 experts, who had estimated a median of 45 cm (17+1⁄2 in) by 2100 for RCP2.6, with a 5%-95% range of 21–82 cm (8+1⁄2–32+1⁄2 in). For RCP8.5, the experts estimated a median of 93 cm (36+1⁄2 in) by 2100, with a 5%-95% range of 45–165 cm (17+1⁄2–65 in). By 2020, the observed ice-sheet losses in Greenland and Antarctica were found to track the upper-end range of the AR5 projections. Consequently, the updated SLR projections in the 2019 IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate were somewhat larger than in AR5, and they were far more plausible when compared to an extrapolation of observed sea level rise trends. The main set of sea level rise projections used in IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) was ultimately only slightly larger than the one in SROCC, with SSP1-2.6 resulting in a 17-83% range of 32–62 cm (12+1⁄2–24+1⁄2 in) by 2100, SSP2-4.5 resulting in a 44–76 cm (17+1⁄2–30 in) range by 2100 and SSP5-8.5 leading to 65–101 cm (25+1⁄2–40 in). The report also provided extended projections on both the lower and the upper end, adding SSP1-1.9 scenario which represents meeting the 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) goal and has the likely range of 28–55 cm (11–21+1⁄2 in), as well as "low-confidence" narrative involving processes like marine ice sheet and marine ice cliff instability under SSP5-8.5. For that scenario, it cautioned that the sea level rise of over 2 m (6+1⁄2 ft) by 2100 "cannot be ruled out".[7] And as of 2022, NOAA suggests 50% probability of 0.5 m (19+1⁄2 in) sea level rise by 2100 under 2 °C (3.6 °F), increasing to >80% to >99% under 3–5 °C (5.4–9.0 °F)." If countries cut greenhouse gas emissions significantly (lowest trace), the IPCC expects sea level rise by 2100 to be limited to 0.3 to 0.6 meters (1–2 feet).However, in a worst case scenario (top trace), sea levels could rise 5 meters (16 feet) by the year 2300. A map showing major SLR impact in south-east Asia, Northern Europe and the East Coast of the US

Map of the Earth with a long-term 6-metre (20 ft) sea level rise represented in red (uniform distribution, actual sea level rise will vary regionally and local adaptation measures will also have an effect on local sea levels). Models consistent with paleo records of sea level rise:  1189  indicate that substantial long-term SLR will continue for centuries even if the temperature stabilizes. After 500 years, sea level rise from thermal expansion alone may have reached only half of its eventual level, which models suggest may lie within ranges of 0.5–2 m (1+1⁄2–6+1⁄2 ft).[51] Additionally, tipping points of Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets are expected to play a larger role over such timescales, with very long-term SLR likely to be dominated by ice loss from Antarctica, especially if the warming exceeds 2 °C (3.6 °F). Continued carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel sources could cause additional tens of metres of sea level rise, over the next millennia. The available fossil fuel on Earth is enough to ultimately melt the entire Antarctic ice sheet, causing about 58 m (190 ft) of sea level rise. In the next 2,000 years the sea level is predicted to rise by 2–3 m (6+1⁄2–10 ft) if the temperature rise peaks at its current 1.5 °C (2.7 °F), by 2–6 m (6+1⁄2–19+1⁄2 ft) if it peaks at 2 °C (3.6 °F) and by 19–22 m (62+1⁄2–72 ft) if it peaks at 5 °C (9.0 °F).[6]: SPM-28  If temperature rise stops at 2 °C (3.6 °F) or at 5 °C (9.0 °F), the sea level would still continue to rise for about 10,000 years. In the first case it will reach 8–13 m (26–42+1⁄2 ft) above pre-industrial level, and in the second 28–37 m (92–121+1⁄2 ft). As both the models and observational records have improved, a range of studies has attempted to project SLR for the centuries immediately after 2100, which remains largely speculative. For instance, when the April 2019 expert elicitation asked its 22 experts about total sea level rise projections for the years 2200 and 2300 under its high, 5 °C warming scenario, it ended up with 90% confidence intervals of −10 cm (4 in) to 740 cm (24+1⁄2 ft) and −9 cm (3+1⁄2 in) to 970 cm (32 ft), respectively (negative values represent the extremely low probability of very large increases in the ice sheet surface mass balance due to climate change-induced increase in precipitation ). The elicitation of 106 experts led by Stefan Rahmstorf had also included 2300 for RCP2.6 and RCP 8.5: the former had the median of 118 cm (46+1⁄2 in), a 17%-83% range of 54–215 cm (21+1⁄2–84+1⁄2 in) and a 5%-95% range of 24–311 cm (9+1⁄2–122+1⁄2 in), while the latter had the median of 329 cm (129+1⁄2 in), a 17%-83% range of 167–561 cm (65+1⁄2–221 in) and a 5%-95% range of 88–783 cm (34+1⁄2–308+1⁄2 in). By 2021, AR6 was also able to provide estimates for year 2150 SLR alongside the 2100 estimates for the first time. According to it, keeping warming at 1.5 °C under the SSP1-1.9 scenario would result in sea level rise in the 17-83% range of 37–86 cm (14+1⁄2–34 in), SSP1-2.6 a range of 46–99 cm (18–39 in), SSP2-4.5 of 66–133 cm (26–52+1⁄2 in) range by 2100 and SSP5-8.5 leading to 98–188 cm (38+1⁄2–74 in). Moreover, it stated that if the "low-confidence" could result in over 2 m (6+1⁄2 ft) by 2100, it would then accelerate further to potentially approach 5 m (16+1⁄2 ft) by 2150. The report provided lower-confidence estimates for year 2300 sea level rise under SSP1-2.6 and SSP5-8.5 as well: the former had a range between 0.5 m (1+1⁄2 ft) and 3.2 m (10+1⁄2 ft), while the latter ranged from just under 2 m (6+1⁄2 ft) to just under 7 m (23 ft). Finally, the version of SSP5-8.5 involving low-confidence processes has a chance of exceeding 15 m (49 ft) by then. In 2018, it was estimated that for every 5 years CO2 emissions are allowed to increase before finally peaking, the median 2300 SLR increases by the median of 20 cm (8 in), with a 5% likelihood of 1 m (3+1⁄2 ft) increase due to the same. The same estimate found that if the temperature stabilized below 2 °C (3.6 °F), 2300 sea level rise would still exceed 1.5 m (5 ft), while the early net zero and slowly falling temperatures could limit it to 70–120 cm (27+1⁄2–47 in). Measurements: Sea level changes can be driven by variations in the amount of water in the oceans, by changes in the volume of that water, or by varying land elevation compared to the sea surface. Over a consistent time period, assessments can source contributions to sea level rise and provide early indications of change in trajectory, which helps to inform adaptation plans. The different techniques used to measure changes in sea level do not measure exactly the same level. Tide gauges can only measure relative sea level, whilst satellites can also measure absolute sea level changes. To get precise measurements for sea level, researchers studying the ice and the oceans on our planet factor in ongoing deformations of the solid Earth, in particular due to landmasses still rising from past ice masses retreating, and also the Earth's gravity and rotation. Satellites: Jason-1 continued the sea surface measurements started by TOPEX/Poseidon. It was followed by the Ocean Surface Topography Mission on Jason-2, and by Jason-3. Since the launch of TOPEX/Poseidon in 1992, an overlapping series of altimetric satellites has been continuously recording the sea level and its changes. Those satellites can measure the hills and valleys in the sea caused by currents and detect trends in their height. To measure the distance to the sea surface, the satellites send a microwave pulse towards Earth and record the time it takes to return after reflecting off the ocean's surface. Microwave radiometers measure and correct the additional delay caused by water vapor in the atmosphere. Combining these data with the precisely known location of the spacecraft determines the sea-surface height to within a few centimetres (about one inch).[59] Rates of sea level rise for the period 1993–2017 have been estimated from satellite altimetry to be 3.0 ± 0.4 millimetres (1⁄8 ± 1⁄64 in) per year. Satellites are useful for measuring regional variations in sea level, such as the substantial rise between 1993 and 2012 in the western tropical Pacific. This sharp rise has been linked to increasing trade winds, which occur when the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) change from one state to the other.[61] The PDO is a basin-wide climate pattern consisting of two phases, each commonly lasting 10 to 30 years, while the ENSO has a shorter period of 2 to 7 years.Tide gauges: Between 1993 and 2018, the mean sea level has risen across most of the world ocean (blue colors). The global network of tide gauges is another important source of sea-level observations. Compared to the satellite record, this record has major spatial gaps but covers a much longer period of time. Coverage of tide gauges started primarily in the Northern Hemisphere, with data for the Southern Hemisphere remaining scarce up to the 1970s. The longest running sea-level measurements, NAP or Amsterdam Ordnance Datum established in 1675, are recorded in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In Australia, record collection is also quite extensive, including measurements by an amateur meteorologist beginning in 1837 and measurements taken from a sea-level benchmark struck on a small cliff on the Isle of the Dead near the Port Arthur convict settlement in 1841. This network was used, in combination with satellite altimeter data, to establish that global mean sea-level rose 19.5 cm (7.7 in) between 1870 and 2004 at an average rate of about 1.44 mm/yr (1.7 mm/yr during the 20th century). By 2018, data collected by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) had shown that the global mean sea level was rising by 3.2 mm (1⁄8 in) per year, at double the average 20th century rate,[68][69] while the 2023 World Meteorological Organization report found further acceleration to 4.62 mm/yr over the 2013–2022 period.[3] Thus, these observations help to check and verify predictions from climate change simulations. Regional differences are also visible in the tide gauge data. Some are caused by the local sea level differences, while others are due to vertical land movements. In Europe for instance, only some land areas are rising while the others are sinking. Since 1970, most tidal stations have measured higher seas, but sea levels along the northern Baltic Sea have dropped due to post-glacial rebound. Past sea level rise: Changes in sea levels since the end of the last glacial episode. An understanding of past sea level is an important guide to where current changes in sea level will end up once these processes conclude. In the recent geological past, thermal expansion from increased temperatures and changes in land ice are the dominant reasons of sea level rise. The last time that the Earth was 2 °C (3.6 °F) warmer than pre-industrial temperatures was 120,000 years ago, when warming due to Milankovitch cycles (changes in the amount of sunlight due to slow changes in the Earth's orbit) caused the Eemian interglacial; sea levels during that warmer interglacial were at least 5 m (16 ft) higher than now. The Eemian warming was sustained over a period of thousands of years, and the magnitude of the rise in sea level implies a large contribution from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets: 1139  According to Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide similar to today's ultimately increased temperature by over 2–3 °C (3.6–5.4 °F) around three million years ago. This temperature increase eventually melted one third of Antarctica's ice sheet, causing sea levels to rise 20 meters above the present values. Since the Last Glacial Maximum, about 20,000 years ago, sea level has risen by more than 125 metres (410 ft), with rates varying from less than 1 mm/year during the pre-industrial era to 40+ mm/year when major ice sheets over Canada and Eurasia melted. meltwater pulses are periods of fast sea level rise caused by the rapid disintegration of these ice sheets. The rate of sea level rise started to slow down about 8,200 years before present; sea level was almost constant for the last 2,500 years. The recent trend of rising sea level started at the end of the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th.

 

Causes: A graph showing ice loss sea ice, ice shelves and land ice. Land ice loss contributetes to SLR. Earth lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017: ice sheets and glaciers raised the global sea level by 34.6 ± 3.1 mm. The rate of ice loss has risen by 57% since the 1990s−from 0.8 to 1.2 trillion tonnes per year. The three main reasons warming causes global sea level to rise are the expansion of oceans due to heating, along with water inflow from melting ice sheets and glaciers. Sea level rise since the start of the 20th century has been dominated by retreat of glaciers and expansion of the ocean, but the contributions of the two large ice sheets (Greenland and Antarctica) are expected to increase in the 21st century. The ice sheets store most of the land ice (~99.5%), with a sea-level equivalent (SLE) of 7.4 m (24 ft 3 in) for Greenland and 58.3 m (191 ft 3 in) for Antarctica. Each year about 8 mm (5⁄16 in) of precipitation (liquid equivalent) falls on the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, mostly as snow, which accumulates and over time forms glacial ice. Much of this precipitation began as water vapor evaporated from the ocean surface. Some of the snow is blown away by wind or disappears from the ice sheet by melt or by sublimation (directly changing into water vapor). The rest of the snow slowly changes into ice. This ice can flow to the edges of the ice sheet and return to the ocean by melting at the edge or in the form of icebergs. If precipitation, surface processes and ice loss at the edge balance each other, sea level remains the same. However scientists have found that ice is being lost, and at an accelerating rate. Ocean heating: There has been an increase in ocean heat content during recent decades as the oceans absorb most of the excess heat created by human-induced global warming. The oceans store more than 90% of the extra heat added to Earth's climate system by climate change and act as a buffer against its effects. The amount of heat needed to increase average temperature of the entire world ocean by 0.01 °C (0.018 °F) would increase atmospheric temperature by approximately 10 °C (18 °F): a small change in the mean temperature of the ocean represents a very large change in the total heat content of the climate system. When the ocean gains heat, the water expands and sea level rises. The amount of expansion varies with both water temperature and pressure. For each degree, warmer water and water under great pressure (due to depth) expand more than cooler water and water under less pressure : 1161  Consequently cold Arctic Ocean water will expand less than warm tropical water. Because different climate models present slightly different patterns of ocean heating, their predictions do not agree fully on the contribution of ocean heating to SLR. Heat gets transported into deeper parts of the ocean by winds and currents, and some of it reaches depths of more than 2,000 m (6,600 ft). Antarctic ice loss: The large volume of ice on the Antarctic continent stores around 70% of the world's fresh water. There is constant ice discharge along the periphery, yet also constant accumulation of snow atop the ice sheet: together, these processes form Antarctic ice sheet mass balance. Warming increases melting at the base of the ice sheet, but it is likely to increase snowfall, helping offset the periphery melt even if greater weight on the surface also accelerates ice flow into the ocean. While snowfall increased over the last two centuries, no increase was found in the interior of Antarctica over the last four decades. Further, sea ice, particularly in the form of ice shelves, blocks warmer waters around the continent from coming into direct contact with the ice sheet, so any loss of ice shelves substantially increases melt raises and instability. The Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica's largest, is about the size of France and up to several hundred metres thick. Different satellite methods for measuring ice mass and change are in good agreement, and combining methods leads to more certainty about how the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and the Antarctic Peninsula evolve. A 2018 systematic review study estimated that the average annual ice loss across the entire continent was 43 gigatons (Gt) during the period from 1992 to 2002, acceletating to an annual average of 220 Gt from 2012 to 2017.[85] The sea level rise due to Antarctica has been estimated to be 0.25 mm per year from 1993 to 2005, and 0.42 mm per year from 2005 to 2015, although there are significant year-to-year variations. In 2021, limiting global warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) was projected to reduce all land ice contribution to sea level rise by 2100 from 25 cm to 13 cm (from 10 to 6 in.) compared to current mitigation pledges, with mountain glaciers responsible for half the sea level rise contribution,[86] and the fate of Antarctica the source of the largest uncertainty.[86] By 2019, several studies have attempted to estimate 2300 sea level rise caused by ice loss in Antarctica alone: they suggest 16 cm (6+1⁄2 in) median and 37 cm (14+1⁄2 in) maximum values under the low-emission scenario but a median of 1.46 m (5 ft) metres (with a minimum of 60 cm (2 ft) and a maximum of 2.89 m (9+1⁄2 ft)) under the highest-emission scenario. East Antarctica: The world's largest potential source of sea level rise is the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS). It holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 53.3 m (174 ft 10 in)[87] Historically, it was less studied than the West Antarctica as it had been considered relatively stable, an impression that was backed up by satellite observations and modelling of its surface mass balance. However, a 2019 study employed different methodology and concluded that East Antarctica is already losing ice mass overall. All methods agree that the Totten Glacier has lost ice in recent decades in response to ocean warming and possibly a reduction in local sea ice cover. Totten Glacier is the primary outlet of the Aurora Subglacial Basin, a major ice reservoir in East Antarctica that could rapidly retreat due to hydrological processes. The global sea level potential of 3.5 m (11 ft 6 in) flowing through Totten Glacier alone is of similar magnitude to the entire probable contribution of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The other major ice reservoir on East Antarctica that might rapidly retreat is the Wilkes Basin which is subject to marine ice sheet instability. Ice loss from these outlet glaciers is possibly compensated by accumulation gains in other parts of Antarctica. In 2022, it was estimated that the Wilkes Basin, Aurora Basin and other nearby subglacial basins are likely to have a collective tipping point around 3 °C (5.4 °F) of global warming, although it may be as high as 6 °C (11 °F), or as low as 2 °C (3.6 °F). Once this tipping point is crossed, the collapse of these subglacial basins could take place as little as 500 or as much as 10,000 years: the median timeline is 2000 years. On the other hand, the entirety of the EAIS would not be committed to collapse until global warming reaches 7.5 °C (13.5 °F) (range between 5 °C (9.0 °F) and 10 °C (18 °F)), and would take at least 10,000 years to disappear.[92][93] It is also suggested that the loss of two-thirds of its volume may require at least 6 °C (11 °F) of warming. West Antarctica: Even though East Antarctica contains the largest potential source of sea level rise, West Antarctica ice sheet (WAIS) is substantially more vulnerable. In contrast to East Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, temperatures on West Antarctica have increased significantly with a trend between 0.08 °C (0.14 °F) per decade and 0.96 °C (1.73 °F) per decade between 1976 and 2012. Consequently, satellite observations recorded a substantial increase in WAIS melting from 1992 to 2017, resulting in 7.6 ± 3.9 mm (19⁄64 ± 5⁄32 in) of Antarctica sea level rise, with a disproportionate role played by outflow glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment. In 2021, AR6 estimated that while the median increase in sea level rise from the West Antarctic ice sheet melt by 2100 is ~11 cm (5 in) under all emission scenarios (since the increased warming would intensify the water cycle and increase snowfall accumulation over the ice sheet at about the same rate as it would increase ice loss), it can conceivably contribute as much as 41 cm (16 in) by 2100 under the low-emission scenario and 57 cm (22 in) under the highest-emission one. This is because WAIS is vulnerable to several types of instability whose role remains difficult to model. These include hydrofracturing (meltwater collecting atop the ice sheet pools into fractures and forces them open), increased contact of warm ocean water with ice shelves due to climate-change induced ocean circulation changes, marine ice sheet instability (warm water entering between the seafloor and the base of the ice sheet once it is no longer heavy enough to displace the flow, causing accelerated melting and collapse) and even marine ice cliff instability (ice cliffs with heights greater than 100 m (330 ft) collapsing under their own weight once they are no longer buttressed by ice shelves). These processes do not have equal influence and are not all equally likely to happen: for instance, marine ice cliff instability has never been observed and was ruled out by some of the more detailed modelling. Thwaites Glacier, with its vulnerable bedrock topography visible.

The Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers are considered the most prone to ice sheet instability processes. Both glaciers' bedrock topography gets deeper farther inland, exposing them to more warm water intrusion into the grounding zone. Their contribution to global sea levels has already accelerated since the beginning of the 21st century, with the Thwaites Glacier now amounting to 4% of the global sea level rise. At the end of 2021, it was estimated that the Thwaites Ice Shelf can collapse in three to five years, which would then make the destabilization of the entire Thwaites glacier inevitable. The Thwaites glacier itself will cause a rise of sea level by 65 cm (25+1⁄2 in) if it will completely collapse,[107][102] although this process is estimated to unfold over several centuries. Since most of the bedrock underlying the West Antarctic Ice Sheet lies well below sea level, it is currently buttressed by Thwaites and Pine Island Glaciers, meaning that their loss would likely destabilize the entire ice sheet.[38][108] This possibility was first proposed back in the 1970s,[37] when a 1978 study predicted that anthropogenic CO2 emissions doubling by 2050 would cause 5 m (15 ft) of SLR from the rapid WAIS loss alone. Since then, improved modelling concluded that the ice within WAIS would raise the sea level by 3.3 m (10 ft 10 in). In 2022, the collapse of the entire West Antarctica was estimated to unfold over a period of about 2000 years, with the absolute minimum of 500 years (and a potential maximum of 13,000 years). At the same time, this collapse was considered likely to be triggered at around 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) of global warming and would become unavoidable at 3 °C (5.4 °F). At worst, it may have even been triggered already: subsequent (2023) research had made that possibility more likely, suggesting that the temperatures in the Amundsen Sea are likely to increase at triple the historical rate even with low or "medium" atmospheric warming and even faster with high warming. Without unexpected strong negative feedbacks emerging, the collapse of the ice sheet would become inevitable. While it would take a very long time from start to end for the ice sheet to disappear, it has been suggested that the only way to stop it once triggered is by lowering the global temperature to 1 °C (1.8 °F) below the preindustrial level; i.e. 2 °C (3.6 °F) below the temperature of 2020. Other researchers suggested that a climate engineering intervention aiming to stabilize the ice sheet's glaciers may delay its loss by centuries and give more time to adapt, although it's an uncertain proposal, and would necessarily end up as one of the most expensive projects ever attempted by humanity. Greenland ice sheet loss: Greenland 2007 melt, measured as the difference between the number of days on which melting occurred in 2007 compared to the average annual melting days from 1988 to 2006. Most ice on Greenland is part of the Greenland ice sheet which is 3 km (10,000 ft) at its thickest. Other Greenland ice forms isolated glaciers and ice caps. The sources contributing to sea level rise from Greenland are from ice sheet melting (70%) and from glacier calving (30%). Average annual ice loss in Greenland more than doubled in the early 21st century compared to the 20th century,[117] and there was a corresponding increase in SLR contribution from 0.07 mm per year between 1992 and 1997 to 0.68 mm per year between 2012 and 2017. Total ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet between 1992 and 2018 amounted to 3,902 gigatons (Gt) of ice, which is equivalent to the SLR of 10.8 mm.[118] The contribution for the 2012–2016 period was equivalent to 37% of sea level rise from land ice sources (excluding thermal expansion).[119] This rate of ice sheet melting is also associated with the higher end of predictions from the past IPCC assessment reports. In 2021, AR6 estimated that under the SSP1-2.6 emission scenario which largely fulfils the Paris Agreement goals, Greenland ice sheet melt adds around 6 cm (2+1⁄2 in) to global sea level rise by the end of the century, with a plausible maximum of 15 cm (6 in) (and even a very small chance of the ice sheet reducing the sea levels by around 2 cm (1 in) due to gaining mass through surface mass balance feedback). The scenario associated with the highest global warming, SSP5-8.5, would see Greenland add a minimum of 5 cm (2 in) to sea level rise, a likely median of 13 cm (5 in) cm and a plausible maximum of 23 cm (9 in). Certain parts of the Greenland ice sheet are already known to be committed to unstoppable sea level rise. Greenland's peripheral glaciers and ice caps crossed an irreversible tipping point around 1997, and will continue to melt. A subsequent study had found that the climate of the past 20 years (2000–2019) would already result of the loss of ~3.3% volume in this manner in the future, committing the ice sheet to an eventual 27 cm (10+1⁄2 in) of SLR, independent of any future temperature change.[126] There is also a global warming threshold beyond which a near-complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet occurs. Earlier research has put this threshold value as low as 1 °C (1.8 °F), and definitely no higher than 4 °C (7.2 °F) above pre-industrial temperatures.[128][26]: 1170  A 2021 analysis of sub-glacial sediment at the bottom of a 1.4 km Greenland ice core finds that the Greenland ice sheet melted away at least once during the last million years, even though the temperatures have never been higher than 2.5 °C (4.5 °F) greater than today over that period.[129][130] In 2022, it was estimated that the tipping point of the Greenland Ice Sheet may have been as low as 0.8 °C (1.4 °F) and is certainly no higher than 3 °C (5.4 °F) : there is a high chance that it will be crossed around 1.5 °C (2.7 °F). Once crossed, it would take between 1000 and 15,000 years for the ice sheet to disintegrate entirely, with the most likely estimate of 10,000 years. Mountain glacier loss: Based on national pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, global mean temperature is projected to increase by 2.7 °C (4.9 °F), which would cause loss of about half of Earth's glaciers by 2100—causing a sea level rise of 115±40 millimeters. There are roughly 200,000 glaciers on Earth, which are spread out across all continents. Less than 1% of glacier ice is in mountain glaciers, compared to 99% in Greenland and Antarctica. However, this small size also makes mountain glaciers more vulnerable to melting than the larger ice sheets. This means they have had a disproportionate contribution to historical sea level rise and are set to contribute a smaller, but still significant fraction of sea level rise in the 21st century. Observational and modelling studies of mass loss from glaciers and ice caps indicate a contribution to sea level rise of 0.2-0.4 mm per year, averaged over the 20th century. The contribution for the 2012–2016 period was nearly as large as that of Greenland: 0.63 mm of sea level rise per year, equivalent to 34% of sea level rise from land ice sources. Glaciers contributed around 40% to sea level rise during the 20th century, with estimates for the 21st century of around 30%.[4] The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report estimated that glaciers contributing 7–24 cm (3–9+1⁄2 in) to global sea levels: 1165 . In 2023, a Science paper estimated that at 1.5 °C (2.7 °F), one quarter of mountain glacier mass would be lost by 2100 and nearly half would be lost at 4 °C (7.2 °F), contributing ~9 cm (3+1⁄2 in) and ~15 cm (6 in) to sea level rise, respectively. Because glacier mass is disproportionately concentrated in the most resilient glaciers, this would in practice remove between 49% and 83% of glacier formations. It had further estimated that the current likely trajectory of 2.7 °C (4.9 °F) would result in the SLR contribution of ~11 cm (4+1⁄2 in) by 2100. Mountain glaciers are even more vulnerable over the longer term. In 2022, another Science paper estimated that almost no mountain glaciers can be expected to survive once the warming crosses 2 °C (3.6 °F), and their complete loss largely inevitable around 3 °C (5.4 °F): there is even a possibility of complete loss after 2100 at just 1.5 °C (2.7 °F). This could happen as early as 50 years after the tipping point is crossed, although 200 years is the most likely value, and the maximum is around 1000 years. Sea ice loss: Sea ice loss contributes very slightly to global sea level rise. If the melt water from ice floating in the sea was exactly the same as sea water then, according to Archimedes' principle, no rise would occur. However melted sea ice contains less dissolved salt than sea water and is therefore less dense, with a slightly greater volume per unit of mass. If all floating ice shelves and icebergs were to melt sea level would only rise by about 4 cm (1+1⁄2 in). Changes to land water storage: Human activity impacts how much water is stored on land. Dams retain large quantities of water, which is stored on land rather than flowing into the sea (even though the total quantity stored will vary somewhat from time to time). On the other hand, humans extract water from lakes, wetlands and underground reservoirs for food production, which often causes subsidence. Furthermore, the hydrological cycle is influenced by climate change and deforestation, which can lead to further positive and negative contributions to sea level rise. In the 20th century, these processes roughly balanced, but dam building has slowed down and is expected to stay low for the 21st century: 1155 . Water redistribution caused by irrigation from 1993 to 2010 caused a drift of Earth's rotational pole by 78.48 centimetres (30.90 in), causing an amount of groundwater depletion equivalent to a global sea level rise of 6.24 millimetres (0.246 in). Impacts: High tide flooding, also called tidal flooding, has become much more common in the past seven decades.[ The impacts of sea level rise include higher and more frequent high-tide and storm-surge flooding, increased coastal erosion, inhibition of primary production processes, more extensive coastal inundation, along with changes in surface water quality and groundwater. These can lead to a greater loss of property and coastal habitats, loss of life during floods and loss of cultural resources. Agriculture and aquaculture can also be impacted. There can also be loss of tourism, recreation, and transport related functions.[10]: 356  Coastal flooding impacts are exacerbated by land use changes such as urbanisation or deforestation of low-lying coastal zones. Regions that are already vulnerable to the rising sea level also struggle with coastal flooding washing away land and altering the landscape.

Because the projected extent of sea level rise by 2050 will be only slightly affected by any changes in emissions,[5] there is confidence that 2050 levels of SLR combined with the 2010 population distribution (i.e. absent the effects of population growth and human migration) would result in ~150 million people under the water line during high tide and ~300 million in places which are flooded every year—an increase of 40 and 50 million people relative to 2010 values for the same.[13][141] By 2100, there would be another 40 million people under the water line during high tide if sea level rise remains low, and 80 million for a high estimate of the median sea level rise.[13] If ice sheet processes under the highest emission scenario result in sea level rise of well over one metre (3+1⁄4 ft) by 2100, with a chance of levels over two metres (6+1⁄2 ft),[16][6]: TS-45  then as many as 520 million additional people would end up under the water line during high tide and 640 million in places which are flooded every year, when compared to the 2010 population distribution.

Major cities threatened by sea level rise. The cities indicated are under threat of even a small sea level rise (of 1.6 feet/49 cm) compared to the level in 2010. Even moderate projections indicate that such a rise will have occurred by 2060.[142][143]

Over the longer term, coastal areas are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels, changes in the frequency and intensity of storms, increased precipitation, and rising ocean temperatures. Ten percent of the world's population live in coastal areas that are less than 10 metres (33 ft) above sea level. Furthermore, two-thirds of the world's cities with over five million people are located in these low-lying coastal areas.[144] In total, approximately 600 million people live directly on the coast around the world.[145] Cities such as Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Osaka and Shanghai will be especially vulnerable later in the century under the warming of 3 °C (5.4 °F), which is close to the current trajectory.[12][36] Altogether, LiDAR-based research had established in 2021 that 267 million people worldwide lived on land less than 2 m (6+1⁄2 ft) above sea level and that with a 1 m (3+1⁄2 ft) sea level rise and zero population growth, that number could increase to 410 million people. Even populations who live further inland may be impacted by a potential disruption of sea trade, and by migrations. In 2023, United Nations secretary general António Guterres warned that sea level rises risk causing human migrations on a "biblical scale". Sea level rise will inevitably affect ports, but the current research into this subject is limited. Not enough is known about the investments required to protect the ports currently in use, and for how they may be protected before it becomes more reasonable to build new port facilities elsewhere. Moreover, some coastal regions are rich agricultural lands, whose loss to the sea can result in food shortages elsewhere. This is a particularly acute issue for river deltas such as Nile Delta in Egypt and Red River and Mekong Deltas in Vietnam, which are disproportionately affected by saltwater intrusion into the soil and irrigation water. Ecosystems:

When seawater reaches inland, coastal plants, birds, and freshwater/estuarine fish are threatened with habitat loss due to flooding and soil/water salinization.[153] So-called ghost forests emerge when coastal forest areas become inundated with saltwater to the point no trees can survive. Starting around 2050, some nesting sites in Florida, Cuba, Ecuador and the island of Sint Eustatius for leatherback, loggerhead, hawksbill, green and olive ridley turtles are expected to be flooded, and the proportion would only increase over time. And in 2016, Bramble Cay islet in the Great Barrier Reef was inundated, flooding the habitat of a rodent named Bramble Cay melomys.[157] In 2019, it was officially declared extinct. While some ecosystems can move land inward with the high-water mark, many are prevented from migrating due to natural or artificial barriers. This coastal narrowing, sometimes called 'coastal squeeze' when considering human-made barriers, could result in the loss of habitats such as mudflats and tidal marshes. Mangrove ecosystems on the mudflats of tropical coasts nurture high biodiversity, yet they are particularly vulnerable due to mangrove plants' reliance on breathing roots or pneumatophores, which might grow to be half a metre tall.[ While mangroves can adjust to rising sea levels by migrating inland and building vertically using accumulated sediment and organic matter, they will be submerged if the rate is too rapid, resulting in the loss of an ecosystem. Both mangroves and tidal marshes protect against storm surges, waves and tsunamis, so their loss makes the effects of sea level rise worse. Human activities, such as dam building, may restrict sediment supplies to wetlands, and thereby prevent natural adaptation processes. The loss of some tidal marshes is unavoidable as a consequence. Likewise, corals, important for bird and fish life, need to grow vertically to remain close to the sea surface in order to get enough energy from sunlight. The corals have so far been able to keep up the vertical growth with the rising seas, but might not be able to do so in the future.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_drop

 

Tidal range is the difference in height between high tide and low tide. Tides are the rise and fall of sea levels caused by gravitational forces exerted by the Moon and Sun, by Earth's rotation and by centrifugal force caused by Earth's progression around the Earth-Moon barycenter. Tidal range depends on time and location. Larger tidal range occur during spring tides (spring range), when the gravitational forces of both the Moon and Sun are aligned (at syzygy), reinforcing each other in the same direction (new moon) or in opposite directions (full moon). The largest annual tidal range can be expected around the time of the equinox if it coincides with a spring tide. Spring tides occur at the second and fourth (last) quarters of the lunar phases. By contrast, during neap tides, when the Moon and Sun's gravitational force vectors act in quadrature (making a right angle to the Earth's orbit), the difference between high and low tides (neap range) is smallest. Neap tides occur at the first and third quarters of the lunar phases. Tidal data for coastal areas is published by national hydrographic offices. The data is based on astronomical phenomena and is predictable. Sustained storm-force winds blowing from one direction combined with low barometric pressure can increase the tidal range, particularly in narrow bays. Such weather-related effects on the tide can cause ranges in excess of predicted values and can cause localized flooding. These weather-related effects are not calculable in advance. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_range

Simple designs with a clear message: you belong to a certain country! I can see these being worn at Skaerbaek, Fanweekends, and other international events. Extrapolating on that, I imagine bracelets with a custom printed event logo tile on them, serving as (vip) ticket or take home gift*. Even better: wear a bracelet with all event tiles you collected over the years! Can you see the possibilities? :D

 

№ 4. Germany.

 

№ 5. The Netherlands. My first patriotic MOC, haha!

 

№ 6. Italy.

 

*One note: currently there is only one size, which I've heard doesn't fit on any adult wrist. So, there would need to be a larger size bracelet in order for this become a thing, but it's an idea!

 

On another experimental foray, but with 35mm Arista and use of Rodinal followed by Xtol. Not alot of experience using this film with different developers so had to do some extrapolation. Unfortunately, freezing rain, overcast skies, and temps below 20 degrees F made it more challenging. I did appreciate more sharpness with this combo, but can't really tell about dynamic range given the blah weather. Thanks for the continued inspiration from my fellow flickeranians. Be safe out there.

A few things came together for this one...

 

After a lot of experimenting, I can say I'm finally happy with some of the results. And aside from all the technique, it took me quite a bit of patience to catch a long exposure with a truck on the road making colorful light trails in front of mountainous scenery without getting the shot ruined with oncoming headlights. Then up top, I got the stars including Rigel and a few constellations to appear as points of light. Best of all, it looks good large!

 

This image, coming from several exposures taken in sequence, was captured on Loveland Pass, near the Arapahoe Basin Ski Area and Keystone, Colorado. Oh and those glowing clouds at the top of the mountains... That glow comes all the way from Denver - some 50 miles away!

 

On the tech side, I used Deep Sky Stacker to reduce noise in the stars by combining 10 8 second exposures (ISO 3200, f/3.2). Then I used a homemade approach to extrapolate the settings needed for a long exposure of the foreground. It allowed me to test in 8 seconds and shoot something cool in 8 minutes (ISO 200, f/4)... sweet!! Oh yea, and I figured out how to (finally) use my live view in the dark for precision focus. On that I'll have to say when I first saw this mostly focused 8 minute exposure taken at ISO 200, I smiled really wide! So after combining the short frames in Deep Sky Stacker, I just blended the results with the foreground in PS.

______________________________

  

Like to see more? Please visit my portfolio at www.coloradocaptures.com.

Cogent disclosure

Productive imagination

Apperception synthesis

 

Have you got your Halloween costume yet?

 

This is my favorite horror character in Silent Hill series.

 

Pyramid Head is a manifestation of dire punishment as extrapolated from the mind of SH2 protagonist James Sunderland. Pyramid Head chases and tortures James throughout the game, mirroring James' own hidden guilt complex.

 

Happy Halloween.

Autumn Leaves, Trunks. © Copyright 2022 G Dan Mitchell.

 

Autumn leaves and soaring tree trunks in a White Mountains forest.

 

This photograph illustrates a few important take-aways from fall photography, things that can perhaps be extrapolated to other kinds of photography, too. Again, the location was not iconic, even though it is along/near iconic places. We had stopped after seeing a sign for a pond, but I ended up finding the nearby forest even more interesting than the thing that identified the location. Note also, that not all of the trees have changed color. As overwhelming as a fully fall-colored forest can be, I feel like the colors often stand out better when there is some “non-color” in the frame, too. Note, too, that I made this photograph in soft light, which intensifies the colors while opening up the shadows. Finally, I think that some non-color structural elements can help with the composition of photographs of the subject — here that comes from the verticals of the tree trunks.

 

One thing we learned on this trip — our first to New England in the fall — is how quickly the leaves reach and then pass their peak color. The build-up seems a bit slower, but there was literally one day when it was obvious that the peak had arrived. And only one day later the leaves began to fall more quickly, bare trees became more apparent, and the color was clearly in decline. The show wasn’t over, but the process was clear. Fortunately, because the color doesn’t arrive everywhere at the same moment, flexible photographers and leaf-peepers can move on to different locations that haven’t peaked yet.

 

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

dahon© 2010

 

A redux to my earlier war memorial pic.. this one has a bit more oomph to it without all the super crazy HDRness..

 

Details:

Taken with the Sigma 10-20 lens

Shot @ 10mm

1 RAW file [0EV]

2 Extrapolated Exposures [-2,+2]

Combined, Tonemapped & Boosted through Photomatix

Minor Sharpening, Crop & Curves applied through Photoshop

 

| On Black | my blog.. | my twitter.. |

 

heres how the old one looked:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/jesephotos/4448961391/]

Farmhouse, now restaurant. Late C14 to right with mid C17 block to left. MAIN BLOCK. Exposed timber-framing with curved braces and brick infilling. 1st floors of service and solar ends jettied forward on brackets and joists. Dragon post to right. Central recess with eaves carried on 2 curved braces. Plain tiled hipped roof with gablets, 1 gabled dormer to left, central stack off-ridge to front and end stack to right. 2 storeys; irregular 2 window front, all win- dows being in central recess except on ground floor with one window on left hand side of ground floor under right hand jetty. All windows glazing bar sashes, except non-opening window with glazing bars on ground floor to right. Arched doorway to right of recess with C20 boarded and ribbed door and 2 storey bay window to left. EXTENSION. Timber-framed, exposed on 1st floor, with red brick dressings. Coursed rubble stone ground floor with red brick dressings. Plain tiled roof with central ridge stack. 2 storeys and cellars; irregular 2 window front, glazing bar sashes except casement on 1st floor to left. One segment- headed collar light to right. C20 boarded and ribbed door with pentice hood, off-centre to left. REAR OF MAIN BLOCK. Gabled stair-tower to rear. INTERIOR. Hall, floored over, with collar-purlin roof and crown-post. Longitudinal crown- post roof over 1st floor of service-end, which may be remains of upper floor hall, from which the house was later extrapolated.

To get straight to the point, the figure just doesn't come together well and it's too wimpy size-wise. Ironically, this was originally what I thought would be the best Mongul combo anyone could create. By extrapolating magenta to dark red (see reference image), I could give Mongul boots, a feature-accurate torso, and a helmet that matched his legs.

 

The updated combo you just saw on my main photostream was really just the result of me fiddling with spare pieces and wanting to experiment with adding 1x1 plates to the bottom of minifigure feet.

 

Reference image: i.stack.imgur.com/z7GFX.jpg

Lady Gouldian Finch, Butterfly World, Florida

 

The Gouldian Finch, Erythrura gouldiae (or Chloebia gouldiae), also known as the Lady Gouldian Finch, Gould's Finch or Rainbow Finch , is a colourful passerine bird endemic to Australia. There is strong evidence of a continuing decline, even at the best-known site near Katherine in the Northern Territory. Large numbers are bred in captivity, particularly in Australia. For instance, in the state of South Australia alone National Parks & Wildlife Department permit returns in the late 1990s showed that over 13,000 Gouldians were being kept by aviculturists. If extrapolated to an Australia-wide figure this would result in a total of over 100,000 birds. In 1992 it was classified as ENDANGERED in the wild under criteria C2ai. This was due to the fact that a: the viable population size was estimated to be less than 2,500 mature individuals and b: no permanent subpopulation was known to contain more than 250 mature individuals and finally c: that a continuing decline was observed in the number of mature individuals. It is currently subject to a conservation program.

Waterfall in Moran State Park on Orcas Island, Washington

Location: Riomaggiore (Italy)

Ph: Giovanni Riccioni

 

During my walking along an alley of Riomggiore I saw these green shutters. Immediately I wanted to arrange this photo as extrapolated detail (shutters) from the red house of the right side.

 

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Detail from Extrapolation by Liliane Lijn - SCVA Sculpture Park

On another experimental foray, but with 35mm Arista and use of Rodinal followed by Xtol. Not alot of experience using this film with different developers so had to do some extrapolation. Unfortunately, freezing rain, overcast skies, and temps below 20 degrees F made it more challenging. I did appreciate more sharpness with this combo, but can't really tell about dynamic range given the blah weather. Thanks for the continued inspiration from my fellow flickeranians. Be safe out there.

Australia is full steam ahead for the second stolen generation.

 

And just like the first the verdict is in “...it has been decided, that in a court you are not represented in, that for the benefit of your children, you will not raise them…”

 

Just blame everything on the rich?

 

As much as Elon Musk, and the other space venturing billionaires are criticized for their effort to commercialise space, unless we are successful in finding by an absolute miracle a remarkably similar planet, we will all suffer a horrible and inevitable fate. Mathematically it is a certainty that in the future, there will be no reproductive freedom as is currently known in the west. Unless we find another habitable planet, and exterminate more innocent living things, reproductive freedom as we know it will end. Can we not just terra form like the Weyland corporation of the Alien movies? Well terra forming is going to take an age, and we do not have that much time. It is a scenario, that l contemplated while studying the arts at university, ironically not one I was introduced to while studying the sciences. While studying the arts my lecturer, a doctorate holder in the arts, instructed me that the world population had been predicted to be held, or plateau at fourteen billion, a number l found horrific. The same lecturer once asked a class l was in, if we were a feminist or not, and to raise our hands if we were. Although it seemed like a name and shame process for those that did not, l raised my hand because l was, and it should be noted, l still am. Additionally it must be said that this writing that contains some of my dairy musings, is not an attack on feminism but a defence of it. Why would l be seemingly critical of feminism? Because feminism is floundering. Why was this number of fourteen billion so horrific to feminism in my opinion? I thought it was horrific, not just for the sheer distress it will place on the planet, but for the fact that when we as a planet hit a population of fourteen billion, the beauty of having children will not be available for all women, nor all men. Reproductive freedom will end; and with it, sex as we know it too, thus leaving sexual freedom to become a misnomer.

 

The scenario led me to question both the process and motives for procreation. It led me to explore the politics and motives for state sanctions, state subsidies, and or the construction of the system that takes children away from their parents. In my research and study, l realised, l was not alone, and that much of what l was contemplating was nothing original. Many have contemplated the issues l looked at, and many have considered those issues before me; but l do not think, that it was comprehended that a second stolen generation, had, or would have, occurred. In the supposed emancipation of woman, who would have thought, that in the attempt to achieve it, children would be abducted by the state once again. Mournfully l do not think that it is possible to talk freely about it without ridicule, and the sadness that means for us all. It causes a lot of personal introspection about the motives of the people who perpetrated it, and who would have a vested interest, in a process that lost its way. One that has and manages to cause so much damage. But what has occurred too once again cause the theft of children? What would be the motive for this? Has the scenario of breeding been high jacked with well-meaning state sanctions, and its mutation, promoted with it, the prostitution of motherhood, via well-meaning state subsidies? Was this a repeat of the old colonial system? Despite the necessity for a safety net, the family unit was, and is prostituted with state subsidies here in Australia. And I contemplated heavily about a presumption that it might be said that those involved where both bad men and bad woman. I thought that this thought pattern would be a simplistic one, when the state had caused it, with state overreach. It was, and is promoted with, populist political pork barrelling of the individual…

 

With those in custody of their children paid more money by the state to not stay with the person they had their children with, what other choice was there? I understand the conundrum of the safety net, and the position everyone is in, but the sanctions, and subsidies, have caused a radical shift, and that shift has occurred in a noticeably brief period of time. It has changed where the centre of the gaussian curves to produce children are positioned. Gaussian curves that took thousands of years to position, with both nature and nurture… This new positioning of the centre of the gaussian curves, has widely occurred in countries where neo feminism is practiced, as opposed to where feminism was being applied. It has become a process promoted with postcolonial western dogma, for some countries in the west, including Australia. Is it part of the decolonisation of west? Is part of postcolonialism to take children away from their fathers, and to dismantle the family unit? One of the reasons why l contemplate why it happened, is that it goes against what the world’s greatest feminist, my grandmother, and what she had taught me by her example. She taught me that you do not expect others to pay for your privilege, you earn it. The Questions are, who has, or will shoulder the cost of this new system? Who is paying for the repositioning of those mathematical bell-shaped curves? And as always, there are rhetorical questions, such as. Is, or was it, a finite system, for both monies, and the custody of the children? Did it become a system where you rob Peter to pay Paul? And in this experiment of monumental size, and consequences, are the social scientists making up numbers like the reserve banks of the world? And do they not consider that unlike the digital world where money has no limit, in the real-world people do.

 

The academic narrative is that the old patriarchal system used to run men into cannons in the name of nationalism. The men were called cannon fodder. It was said that they, the patriarchy, were leading lambs to the slaughter. A modern term seemed to morph from this, and it was sheeple. But with the destruction of feminism’s admirable objective, that of equality of opportunity, a new group of cannon fodder or sheeple has been produced, and it has occurred via a second stolen generation. In counting people like numbers of a herd, instead of as individuals with inalienable rights, are the sheeple, being treated anything less than statistical cannon fodder? The question is who or what does this new stolen generation serve? Could the feminists have been deliberately misguided to a non-beneficial objective or was it an initiative-taking result of neo feminist dogma. Neo feminism that is in opposition to my grandmother’s example and the feminists of her era, seems to feature heavily in the neo feminist movement. Were the results inevitable once the contributions that males make to their families were disrespected. The result of that disrespect is that it has produced a second stolen generation. And just like the first stolen generation it comes from the undervaluing of a parent’s right to raise their children, and how valuable that contribution is in the future wellbeing of the child or children. The statistics are that in Australia 45% of court proceedings result in sole custody being awarded to the mother. In contrast only 11% of fathers will receive sole custody. Only 3% of court cases result in a Court Order that mandates no contact with one of the child’s parents, 83% of the time the mother ended up with custody.

 

Like the old government Aboriginal protection board, the new system is weighted in favour of children being taken away from those deemed as unessicary, unessicary for anything other than their labour. In the old protectorate system, children were taken away from Aboriginal mothers who were the predominate raisers of children. And just like the current stolen generation it is was said to have been done for the greater good. To paraphrase the band Midnight Oil’s song and its themes, what a “…Short Memory…” Under the new government child protectorate board, woman are receiving custody, at a rate that makes feminism seem like a pathetic ideal. Feminism was sold as being about equality of the sexes, but this is far from what has been achieved when it comes to who receives child custody of the children. With most children being taken away from their fathers by the court or given up by their fathers due to a financial reality. The reality is that his family, would get more money on single parent benefits while he worked and subsided the family while in isolation. The result of this process involving court rulings and financial stimulus, is that the numbers of this second stolen generation far exceed the first one. The first stolen generation saw approximately 100 000 Australian Aboriginal children taken from their families. And it was horrific. The new system sees 1 in 3 marriages end in divorce, on average, at the 12-year mark. Every year around thirty-nine thousand marriages are broken, a statistic that does not include unmarried couples. (It is a poor statistic, but l tried typing in “…how many children are taken away from their fathers in Australia…” and got back metaphoric crickets chirping. I wanted a definitive number, a number that would drive home the scale of the incident or crime.) Of those marriages that have children they predominantly go to the mother both by court edict, and or end up with the mother, as it is more economically advantages, under the Australian state subsidised system. Yes, the state here in Australia pays a person to separate from their child’s other parent. In Australia, the state pays you to break apart your family.

 

But where is the word sorry? Who will say sorry to a group of people systemically discriminated against, and reduced to nothing more than a pay-packet? Where is the word sorry for repeating the atrocities of the past? It has been said, like a paraphrase of the old system, and to reiterate, “…it has been found, in a court that you are not represented in, that for the benefit of your child, you will not raise them…” How are men not represented in a court that has predominately male judges? Well, it is not certainly their peer group. How many blue-collar men are actively recruited to work at the court other than as guards, let alone employed to give decisions on where children go? No, the decision making is left to university educated individuals. Individuals with the majority of their self-experience of the struggle of modern-day blue-collar males, being their meetings in the court, where the men are under extreme duress. It is not just the court, it is also a state-run social system, ran by a populist mob, with a populist rhetoric all its own. To herd the sheeple, all you need to know are the trigger words, trigger words which enable you to dog whistle the submissive into position. With most separations happening in lower socio-economic groups, there is a chasm between the have, and the have nots. That chasm extends to where the have nots children end up doing their domestic service, or labouring jobs for the rich, and it is starkly statistically evident. Yes, just like the first stolen generation, the stolen children are prepared for a life of service. A life of service to those considered better than them. On the modern-day mission, constructed of state sanctions, is a subsidised commission house, the state subsidised school, the state subsidized childcare, state subsidized health care, and state subsidized and promoted single parent further education. Under this system of reward, where is the incentive to allow children to grow up in close, and constant contact, with their father? The result is state built expectations for the dreams of the children involved. As a parent, Martin Luther King may have had a dream for his children, but in Australia, if you are blue collar, the state does it for you, not the parents. They will on average, never go onto receive equality of opportunity, when it comes to raising their children. Fathers that are someone’s son, uncle, nephew, grandfather, brother, and father, will never see feminism’s final objective, when it comes to equality of opportunity. Because it currently does not exist and has not existed. At lower wages, and lower salaries, there is no financial incentive for a woman to stay with the father of her children. The only incentive is that her children will be statistically less likely to go to jail, and or have better social outcomes on average if she stays with her male partner. Ironically, this does not seem to be enough. The fact is, the math is simple, and commonly known in the lower socioeconomic groups of both woman and men. The subsidies push for a separation of the family. The accounting is not hard, and it is in gross favour of the destruction of the family unit.

 

The result of this neo feminist abuse in the name of feminism, has resulted in most men who separate from their partners being denied the human right, of raising their children. For some men it is deprived even on a part time basis. Most will have their children taken away from them by the state, one way, or another. With what is a rebirth of the processes of the old Aboriginal state protectorate board, children are stolen regardless of race from their parents. It is done under the guise that it is for the benefit of both the children and society. It is part of the state propagated and sponsored system, and it is backed by the social sciences. What type of science relies on statistical outliers for the absolute stifling via political debate on the subject? Given the growth of jails, jails first filled with the males of the first stolen generation, that now filled with males of the second stolen generations, when will this process of child abduction be admitted, that it is an unmitigated failure by the social sciences. If it cannot be seen for what it graphically is, what would be the motives for this? If the plan were to have as many men in jail as possible, they have backed the proverbial winner. If the plan were to produce as many single mothers as possible, they could not have tried harder or been much more successful. How can the raising of children be reduced to political catch phrases, catch phrases that site statistical outliers as the average or the norm? It has produced a state sanctioned system, that with huge sweeps of the political and social broad sword, has decimated the functioning of Australian family units. So, who was put to the metaphoric sword for crimes they did not commit, denied basic human rights, that where legitimized with legal judgments? Legal judgments that ended in deaths for many of those subjected to their mandates? And to be utterly factious. Who would have thought that stealing or abducting a person’s child, or children, would drive so many to commit suicide? If death was an all-too-common outcome, did this new process become a process of statistically generated murder, or wilful collateral damage. Was this the cost for an objective that did not and does not serve the greater good of society? Add in a social narrative, where the patriarchy is responsible for all the world’s past evils, and it becomes highly ironic, that the reality is, that many Aboriginal missions were staffed by mostly woman, and that most schools are currently staffed by a majority of woman. Do not let the labelling or othering misdirect you though, all you need to do is just do a few substitutions for the new perpetrators of the new stolen generation, and you will get the picture. And it should be noted, that trying to find out the number of women involved in the first stolen generation is another statistic that the internet seems to have put off the search engine radar. How many women were involved or were instigators in both stolen generations? Well, the internet does not seem to have a number. It is essentially a narrative omission, one that suits a university spread historical take on the evils of colonialism and the patriarchy. I suppose the women involved where just following orders? An excuse that Nazi prison guards of the World War two death camps where not allowed to use. What will be the excuse, when it is widely recognised, that a second stolen generation has occurred? Who will be blamed, and who will say sorry? And when will it be admitted that the children of the second stolen generation suffer just like the first.

 

The ethical and moral dilemma did not end there, it has turned into a veritable sexual, and reproductive Smorgasbord, with one in five woman having children to more than one father in the west. Just turn the lazy Suzanne past the not so tasty ones. Males once catered for in the antiquated old system of marriage, are not so much anymore. More concerning was, and is, the beath of blood lines, with some men fathering many children to many women, and some men fathering none. These males are among the unseen, and not so readily available statistics, of state sanctioned or generated genocide. A genocide of undesirable breeding males? Why would these statistics be hard to find? It must be unpopular to count the numbers of dead males, and to attribute those dead people a cause of death, let alone to count, all the millions of children, and their descendance, that have been adversely affected. Why would a university, which teaches the universal evil of males, instruct about the abuses inflicted on males? Who will pay for those statistics on crimes against humanity to be generated, and who will make them publicly available? What arts faculty which preaches ad verbatim the evils of the patriarchy, will disseminate those statistics? When will relevant word searches find or highlight those statistics, without wading through irrelevant internet search results, search results carefully worded about the inadequacies of men? Search results, not related to the theft of their children, and the death of those fathers. Men who were someone’s son.

Considering the worst-case scenario is like reading the communist manifesto, of Marx, with a few modern twists. Was it a deliberate act by those in positions of power to create a new proletariat class, and have them used as statistical cannon fodder? Was it a heinous statisticians act to use expendable males in a new form of class warfare? Class warfare where they were written off, and culled with hidden statistics? If the males did not like it, will they be given a metaphoric white feather like those that were non-combatants of the first world war? Ridiculed for their lack of new age moral stoicism? Just like a war, the theft of children has caused many men to die. And to ask a rhetorical question. Does that number exceed some of the West’s modern wars?

 

The theft of children has undoubtably once again caused a deprivation of human rights, in a systemic process, of state sanctioned discrimination. More children than the number who suffer a process of state sanctioned, and state subsidised bastardisation of their children have been affected. Is it systemic state sanctioned discrimination? Yes. And just like the first stolen generation we are seeing a higher incidence of crime and incarceration produced. Additionally, like the first stolen generation, we also see education standards dropping. As a result of the enforcement of this new well-meaning sate sanctioned atrocity, those that instigate and enforce it via law, do it without due regard for the on average poorer outcomes that it produces for all families. For if they cared, why would they keep doing something they know fails. Why would they keep applying dogma, that on average fails to produce good outcomes? It is yet another well-meaning state system that has failed. In the process of its production, they did not shatter the nuclear family; they attacked or mutated all types of families in the west. And like most cellular mutations they were predominantly unfavourable mutations; mutations that resulted in a cancer or a sickness. Is this what has become of the feminist movement? The destruction of the family unit, replaced by the pseudo utopian fallacy that a village raises a child? It made me consider the satirical proposition. Where is this magical Smurf village? In a world where mega cities contain approximately half of the world’s population? Cities so large, that they metaphorically step over the living dead in the street. Where is the humanity in this lie, a lie that sees children once again stolen from their parents? Children stolen from their parents for their best interests, and for the greater good.

 

Is this what feminism has become? Not equality of opportunity like my grandmother taught me, but a process where the males in neo feminists societies pay disproportionality for the privileges of males and females they were never to be included in the lives of? And do those newly acquired rights, include the ability to destroy the lives on average of those stolen children? The rhetorical question is, did a minority of men and the majority of woman gain rights in a finite system, and thus take away justice from the innocent males in their own families? Did they gain their freedoms by taking away rights from someone else’s male children, including their own? What has happened, does not even approach equality of outcome, let alone equality of opportunity. For if that was the objective of neo feminism, it has failed! There is no equality in a system that steals children from their parents, and then sees the children on average worse off.

 

With the race now on to hit fourteen billion, l asked the question who will be allowed to breed when we hit that number? Will it be the children of broken families? Families that on average show a higher chance of both having poor social outcomes, and being burdens on society? Did they, (they, being those that help set up this democratically undebatable hot potato,) know selective breeding will or must happen, and did they not inform the public? If they are not truthful and forth right with the public, how does, or will, democracy work? How will democracy function, when its most fundamental asset its citizens, cannot make an informed decision? When will informed consent be allowed, and thus given? And was, or has informed consent been taken away from lower socio-economic sons, fathers, uncles, brothers, and grandfathers? It is a rhetorical question, as how can they consent when they have no other option? Consent cannot be given when only one option is presented. Without informed consent the neo feminists have done exactly that, they have taken away informed consent. For some men, or sons, it is a death sentence. For some families it is a form of genocide, with no chance of their males having male children.

 

In this now neo feminist western world, is every position of power to be held or filled with a failed neo feminist? One that expects the freedoms they push for, to be paid for by someone other than themselves? Is not that a variation of the old class system? Are all positions of power to be held by a social engineering arts degree holder, as opposed to the mathematician, scientist, or the no academic? Modern day neo feminism has become not about gaining equal personal rights and freedoms like traditional feminism wanted, but taking those rights away from others, and having others pay for those newly acquired rights. It was a finite system, and once equality was exceeded in the family court, it was boys and men in families that paid the price. They paid for it by becoming involuntary subjects in an experiment, an unethical experiment. It saw them become indentured labourers, or logic gated like cattle, for both breeding and function. As a result, they have had their children stolen on mass. Logically it forced me to think of a foul consideration if l had a son, the consideration was, “would I like the chance that my son was to be considered a steer, a steer in a cattle yard, presented with little choice but the slaughter gate in a system that is manifestly designed not to serve them?” Or do we, including me, believe he whomever he is, as in your son, my son, is, or will be, the breeding bull? This degradation of human rights, involving the theft of children, has become about men paying for those newly acquired breeding powers of the state. Not the breeding powers of females. And it has seen many men written off as genetically unworthy, financial burdens, and or unfashionably undesirable.

 

Who paid for this power transfer? In the majority in the west, and to reiterate ad nauseum once again, it was the brothers, the sons, the fathers, the uncles, and the grandfathers, of lower income families. Who does it tax? Mostly, new sons. And who is most likely to die? Mostly, new sons. Just like in the world wars. Recently it was repeatedly and publicly stated in the US, that society should be about emotive feelings and not mathematics. In that math less future that selectively counts the dead, have the West’s female neo feminists and their male sycophants become the ultimate narcissists? What used to be about the feelings of the majority as in democracy, has become the feelings of a minority, and the majority are not being served. And to sight the doctrine of Engels and Marx, there is an oppressor and the repressed. Not so ironically Engels and Marx where right, the ruling class can and sometimes do become the oppressors. Just like the first stolen generation, those in power, took the children away from the those with no power, and the market economy that produced both these travesties was politics. And just like the first stolen generation the second stolen generation are used for sex, and bred like cattle, by those in positions of power. Was this all done in the name of so-called reproductive and sexual freedom? To produce on mass, a modern-day proletariat class. Was it done for feminist rights? Who were these new freedoms for? Freedoms that with absolute mathematical certainty will end unless Musk and Co can find us a new planet? What a dark period in history it will be remember as. What type of blindness sees the facade of reproductive freedom used so that breeding in all countries will be eventually limited, to a certain few. If we extrapolate for its occurrence, it is already happening. And who will be this breeding few? Do the people instigating this system think it is them? In a derivation of Marx and Engle’s conversation on economy, the ruling class no longer deal in money, they deal in children. And if the ruling class’s children are competing against the children of single mothers, they statistically have a better chance of attaining positions of power over them. But unlike the old class system, as identified by Marx and Engels, those classed as better in the future, will have an increased chance of breeding if it comes down to an engineered fallacy of social or genetic merit. Future breeding events may not ironically include neo feminist blood lines regardless of their families’ countries of origin or race. Are these people and their political associates’ regardless of sex, poor at mathematics? Do they believe that they are the chosen ones, as they surround themselves with sycophants, in an echo chamber?

 

How quickly, these persecuted pacifists or people of peace, have ascended to positions of power. But if we are permitted, or allowed, to count the dead, or those in prison, they are far from peaceful, nor powerless. Despite the numbers of the dead, and the sure failure of their new breeding system, the fallacy of reproductive freedom is still being sold and wielded by neo feminists. Like snake oil salespeople they and their political associates sell it as one of the panaceas for all the world’s problems. But wholistically, it is a betrayal of their families, themselves, and especially their sons. If they say they cannot do exponential population growth extrapolations, they are either lying or incompetent. It produces a graph, one that l have been instructed at university level, will end at a very blunt fourteen billion. Provided that the narcissist neo feminist’s mirror has an immediate sexual gratification, who should care about the brutal reality of maths, and what will most certainly happen? Provided someone other than mothers pay for the raising of their children, l suppose it is clear sailing till we hit an iceberg, an iceberg that is the size of a mountain sitting in plain sight. An iceberg with two thirds of its body hidden below the surface of the water. An iceberg, hidden in the dark unnoticed due to hard to acquire statistics, and unavailable definitive finite numbers. And to paraphrase Edward John Smith, (the captain of the Titanic), it is “…full steam ahead…”, “…this ship is unsinkable…”, while the rich danced, and the poor where locked in the lower decks to drown.

“Short memory” ...

 

Nottingham Victoria North Up Inner home/starters gantry - extrapolated from a 1930s photo.

 

I don't know why the ladder on the second doll from right is missing? it may have been erased on the original negative, also there are probably too many weight bars on the goods line doll (a clone).

 

This gantry, along with a similar one at Vic Sth, were replaced by coloured lights with route indicators during the 1930s.

Manipulation alert!!

He is not an one-eyed or blind. I was just extrapolating the dodge tool on some random elements. Seeing the output, could not resist me from uploading this. Don't know if this is against any law but the fact is - I work on art, not journalism.

Look at this crazy place I found in Shanghai!

 

This was inside one of the many government buildings. It was a multi-story complex dedicated to the past, present, and future of Shanghai. It was filled with multimedia presentations on the water systems, photo exhibits of the Bund under British control, and video extrapolations of what the city would become in 2020.

 

Of all these cool things, the best was this gigantic model of Shanghai. I walked around it about five times, trying to get some kind of sense of how to photograph the dang thing. Then, finally, I decided to grab a shot that included a few tourists to show the scale of this monstrosity.

 

By the way, thanks so much for all the interest in the Newsletter yesterday! I put a map on that page showing where all the early subscribers are coming from. I was, frankly, surprised how many people signed up! Now the pressure is on to deliver something that is worthwhile!

 

from the blog at www.stuckincustoms.com

The John Day Fossil Beds Monument includes a whole bunch of different areas and geological features. Hills, canyons, rivers and mountains shaped by global climate change over millions of years. The layers of rock, sediment and fossils found telling the story.

 

Looking at Sheep Rock Mountain, you can see the layers of geological history. 44 million years ago this area was sub tropical with humid hot weather and flora/fauna to match. 30 million years ago it became cooler/drier and transitioned to a woodland type climate. And as recent as 7 million years ago these parts were covered by grasslands with an explosive volcanic eruption from the east resulting in ash making its mark on the landscape.

 

It's hard to comprehend the history of the planet and the changes it has gone through, but areas like this where the geology has been studied, documented, and extrapolated sure do help.

 

Image with my Hasselblad 500cm

My city has been slowly growing for a while, but I haven't taken pictures. A couple of the new buildings went to Brick Fiesta, while some others haven't been seen before. I'll be posting individual pics in the next few days.

 

Among the newcomers are several new office buildings, a shiny convention center, an extrapolation of this apartment building into a complex, a gas station, and a little creek to break up the concrete jungle.

 

I've definitely noticed that I have a tendency to push the limits of the 16x16 micropolis module. I really need to make some more 'overhangable' modules to give me more configuration options.

Hurricane Joaquin continued to intensify in the Bahamas on October 1 and NASA and NOAA satellites have been providing valuable data on the storm. NASA's GPM and Terra satellites and NOAA's GOES-East satellite provided rainfall, cloud extent, cloud height and other data to forecasters. Joaquin became a major hurricane today, October 1, reaching Category 3 status on the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale.

 

On October 1 at 1330 UTC (9:30 a.m. EDT) NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured this visible image of Hurricane Joaquin covering the southern Bahamas and extending over southeastern Cuba, and the island of Hispaniola (which includes Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Joaquin's eye had become completely visible now that the storm had reached Category 3 status.

 

On October 1, a Hurricane Warning was in effect for the Central Bahamas, Northwestern Bahamas including the Abacos, Berry Islands, Eleuthera, Grand Bahama Island, and New Providence, The Acklins, Crooked Island, and Mayaguana in the southeastern Bahamas. A Hurricane Watch was in effect for Bimini and Andros Island, and a Tropical Storm Warning was in effect for the remainder of the southeastern Bahamas excluding the Turks and Caicos Islands and Andros Island.

 

According to NHC, at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 UTC), the center of Hurricane Joaquin was located near latitude 23.2 North, longitude 73.7 West. That's just 10 miles (15 km) north of Samana Cays, Bahamas and about 75 miles (120 km) southeast of San Salvador, Bahamas.

 

Joaquin was moving toward the west-southwest near 5 mph (7 kph), and this motion is expected to continue today. NHC noted that a turn toward the west- northwest is forecast tonight (Oct. 1), followed by a turn toward the north and an increase in forward speed on Friday, Oct. 2. On the forecast track, the center of Joaquin will move near or over portions of the central Bahamas today and tonight and pass near or over portions of the northwestern Bahamas on Friday.

 

Maximum sustained winds are near 120 mph (195 km/h) with higher gusts. Joaquin is a category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Some strengthening is forecast in the next day or so, with some fluctuations in intensity possible on Friday. Hurricane force winds extend outward up to 35 miles (55 km) from the center and tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 140 miles (220 km).

 

The minimum central pressure just extrapolated by an Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter aircraft is 942 millibars.

 

For updated forecasts, watches and warnings visit the National Hurricane Center (NHC) website: www.nhc.noaa.gov.

 

Credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project

 

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The Oracle Of Exosthys - Klathenisa by Daniel Arrhakis (2025)

 

Aletheia or Alethia is truth or disclosure in philosophy. The literal meaning of the Greek word ἀλήθεια is "the state of not being hidden; the state of being evident.

 

Truth as the basis of a new society and a powerful mystical vision of a future based on Science and Spirituality and the extrapolation of future events through Artificial Intelligence - The Oracle Of Exosthys.

 

Klathenisa was a priestesses like Pythia at Delphi And one of the first bionic Priestesses to use Artificial Intelligence to predict the future using quantum computing at the end of the 21st Century.

  

This is my second attempt shooting at Kimmeridge, and as with last time the sun was really difficult to expose for, rising as it does to the left of the bay and moving across in front of it. I did my best here, but admit controlling the contrast was once again a nightmare... I'll do a third trip later this year, and now through elimination know just what time of day to visit for optimum conditions!

 

Speaking of which, (and apologies to those of you who are already aware of it), I'd highly recommend The Photographer's Ephemeris for anyone serious about landscape. It's an invaluable programme that basically gives you the direction and time the sun rises and sets (ditto the moon), calculable from any point you choose. It doesn't matter if you're planning on shooting in the middle of the day (you don't do that though, right?) as the information given should still help you extrapolate. It's a free download for your desktop, or can be used out in the field if you've a smartphone and download it as a £5.99 app - definitely worth it in my view.

 

photoephemeris.com/

Saône-et-Loire France.

Departing fields plenty arriving I,

Time to extrapolate nature more fully alive,

the moon smiles to quickly.

Steve.D.Hammond.

Acer.

 

Our brains are lazy – take visual perception. Our minds are continually trying to find shortcuts, approximations, even fabrications to make it easier to process the dynamic scenes of life into something they find meaningful.

 

They probably need to take the lazy way because if they approached analysing a scene like a computer does they would be too slow and overheat anyway.

 

As a result, our minds are really good at pattern matching. If they find a pattern it doesn’t need to process the whole scene - it just remembers the pattern and extrapolates from there.

 

So patterns and repetition are really important in our visual perception. That’s why they are important in photography - we’re hitching a cheap ride on something our minds find really interesting and which they’re good at spotting.

 

And if you combine it with the need for face recognition from the first time we open our eyes then symmetry becomes even more important. It’s the simplest way to inject a pattern into a scene, but it also triggers some very fundamental emotional keys.

 

Which is a very long-winded way of saying I like kaleidoscopes! And one of the easy cheats in image crafting world is simply to add symmetry. Bang, the visual cortices of the unsuspecting viewer are zinged...

 

(As a totally off the track aside doesn’t the word kaleidoscope sound nice? A bit like a horse, cantering perhaps…

[and now there are people all over the world who are saying in their minds: kaleidoscope… kaleidoscope… kaleidoscope… :)

Welcome to the Smiling Sunday group!])

 

This image started out with an early variant of today’s Sliders Sunday Acer picture with slightly different colours. I then mirrored it in Affinity Photo using two mirrors.

 

The Photo mirror filter (I think there is something similar in Photoshop) has four or five sliders which each affect the result quite radically so it’s fun to play with. Most interestingly you can drag the cursor around the image while you are setting the filter up and that affects the origin of the mirrors, which dramatically alters things. And then you can mirror a mirrored image, again and again!

 

All too much fun: sometimes I wonder how I ever get around to publishing anything at all on Flickr (especially on a Sunday)…

 

Here I was looking for something that was still identifiably an Acer, and not a piece of patterned wallpaper or ceramic tile.

 

Having created the symmetry I used the Curves tool in LAB mode to selectively change some of the colours. In this case, I spotted that a deep blue background added an engaging contrast, so that’s what we ended up with (just in case you think I have any idea where I am going when I start!).

 

Thank you for taking time to look. I hope you enjoy the image and Smile on Sunday :)

 

[See Autumn Fire for more processing detail if you are interested.]

Extrapolation.

NASA image release July 3, 2012

 

Caption: Resembling a Fourth of July skyrocket, Herbig-Haro 110 is a geyser of hot gas from a newborn star that splashes up against and ricochets off the dense core of a cloud of molecular hydrogen. Although the plumes of gas look like whiffs of smoke, they are actually billions of times less dense than the smoke from a July 4 firework. This Hubble Space Telescope photo shows the integrated light from plumes, which are light-years across.

 

--

Herbig-Haro (HH) objects come in a wide array of shapes, but the basic configuration stays the same. Twin jets of heated gas, ejected in opposite directions away from a forming star, stream through interstellar space. Astronomers suspect that these outflows are fueled by gas accreting onto a young star surrounded by a disk of dust and gas. The disk is the "fuel tank," the star is the gravitational engine, and the jets are the exhaust.

 

When these energetic jets slam into colder gas, the collision plays out like a traffic jam on the interstate. Gas within the shock front slows to a crawl, but more gas continues to pile up as the jet keeps slamming into the shock from behind. Temperatures climb sharply, and this curving, flared region starts to glow. These "bow shocks" are so named because they resemble the waves that form at the front of a boat.

 

In the case of the single HH 110 jet, astronomers observe a spectacular and unusual permutation on this basic model. Careful study has repeatedly failed to find the source star driving HH 110, and there may be good reason for this: perhaps the HH 110 outflow is itself generated by another jet.

 

Astronomers now believe that the nearby HH 270 jet grazes an immovable obstacle - a much denser, colder cloud core - and gets diverted off at about a 60-degree angle. The jet goes dark and then reemerges, having reinvented itself as HH 110.

 

The jet shows that these energetic flows are like the erratic outbursts from a Roman candle. As fast-moving blobs of gas catch up and collide with slower blobs, new shocks arise along the jet's interior. The light emitted from excited gas in these hot blue ridges marks the boundaries of these interior collisions. By measuring the current velocity and positions of different blobs and hot ridges along the chain within the jet, astronomers can effectively "rewind" the outflow, extrapolating the blobs back to the moment when they were emitted. This technique can be used to gain insight into the source star's history of mass accretion.

 

This image is a composite of data taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2004 and 2005 and the Wide Field Camera 3 in April 2011.

 

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

 

NASA image use policy.

 

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.

 

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On another experimental foray, but with 35mm Arista and use of Rodinal followed by Xtol. Not alot of experience using this film with different developers so had to do some extrapolation. Unfortunately, freezing rain, overcast skies, and temps below 20 degrees F made it more challenging. I did appreciate more sharpness with this combo, but can't really tell about dynamic range given the blah weather. Thanks for the continued inspiration from my fellow flickeranians. Be safe out there.

here’s a house. or an almost house. which led me to ask some questions:

 

is it being built or deconstructed?

what utility does it have in it’s extant form?

when we look at it are we seeing it for what it is or what it represents in terms of potential?

how do we overlook what it actually is (a bunch of wood, cobbled together) and only see what it represents (a potentially finished house)?

what amazing cognition is involved in extrapolating from a bunch of wood into a finished house?

does it have aesthetic merit in it’s extant form, and if so what?

etc.

see ‘7’.

it’s an interesting challenge, i think, to see this construction for what it is, divorced of any potential infused future utility.... tmblr.co/ZHkOLwmUDBk1

Cobb's Wren is only found on the Falkland Islands and was named after Arthur Cobb who was a farmer and naturalist who wrote books on the wildlife of the Falkland Islands. Cobb collected the first specimens of his eponymous wren in 1909. Introduced rats have extirpated it from the larger islands in the Falklands but it still occurs on some of the smaller islands that have remained rat-free. In the late 1990s surveys estimated there were 4500 to 8000 breeding pairs but such wide confidence limits suggests quite a bit of extrapolation was involved. I have seen them only on Carcass Island, and only a handful of birds on each of my three visits. So my experience is that they may have declined since the 1990s survey.

Farmhouse, now restaurant. Late C14 to right with mid C17 block to left. MAIN BLOCK. Exposed timber-framing with curved braces and brick infilling. 1st floors of service and solar ends jettied forward on brackets and joists. Dragon post to right. Central recess with eaves carried on 2 curved braces. Plain tiled hipped roof with gablets, 1 gabled dormer to left, central stack off-ridge to front and end stack to right. 2 storeys; irregular 2 window front, all win- dows being in central recess except on ground floor with one window on left hand side of ground floor under right hand jetty. All windows glazing bar sashes, except non-opening window with glazing bars on ground floor to right. Arched doorway to right of recess with C20 boarded and ribbed door and 2 storey bay window to left. EXTENSION. Timber-framed, exposed on 1st floor, with red brick dressings. Coursed rubble stone ground floor with red brick dressings. Plain tiled roof with central ridge stack. 2 storeys and cellars; irregular 2 window front, glazing bar sashes except casement on 1st floor to left. One segment- headed collar light to right. C20 boarded and ribbed door with pentice hood, off-centre to left. REAR OF MAIN BLOCK. Gabled stair-tower to rear. INTERIOR. Hall, floored over, with collar-purlin roof and crown-post. Longitudinal crown- post roof over 1st floor of service-end, which may be remains of upper floor hall, from which the house was later extrapolated.