I got choked up this morning when learning that Mother Nature thwarted the 40 or so scientists who had spent a couple of weeks making their treacherous way to Antarctica from New Zealand with the major intent of dropping a very long instrument into a huge glacier in order to better understand how fast it is cracking and melting.
The 40 scientists aboard South Korean icebreaker, Araon, were gleeful, according to The New York Times, which has two reporters aboard, when they reached the Thwaites Glacier on Jan. 7.
Should Antarctica’s largest glacier break up and thus turn slowly — or God forbid quickly — from ice to water, the science suggests coastal areas across the globe would rapidly rise at least two feet, but potentially 10-15 over a longer time.
The mission included not just the drilling project, which should “go a long way toward helping scientists predict how quickly Thwaites will melt,” according to British oceanographer Peter Davis, who was quoted by The Times in January.
Good thing the crew had other missions for tracking the glacier’s demise, because the NYT article that brought me to tears Wednesday morning said “the expedition suffered a significant setback when instruments the scientists were lowering down a half-mile hole in the glacier got stuck and then froze over.”
It wasn’t just me sitting in my tropical bungalow surrounded by the humming of generators 6,000 miles from the slippery glacier who felt the defeat, “It was a gutting moment for the crew. A project almost a decade in the making had crumbled at the final stage,” The Times stated.
Note, this daring, decade-long project wasn’t to explore what was causing the glacier to melt away, but how fast it is going to happen.
Toxic fumes from coal, oil and gas-fired electrical energy plants represent 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. One quarter.
Renewable energy is the answer. And it doesn’t even take our tropical climate of sun, wind and water to do it. Denmark leads Europe in renewable heating and electricity production at 96 percent, followed by Sweden.
Solar, waste-to-energy, wind and hydro have been on the political tables of the Virgin Islands for two decades … all of it doable. All of it.
It is the under the political tables that was and is the problem.
We the people who don’t live the lush life of the highly corruptible elected and other public servants in a position to be reached under the table, many of whom demand it, need to take back our power. It is an election year.
Hopefully, when the sun shows again after a few days of unprecedented wind, waves, rain, gloom and as-yet-unexplained power outages, we will grab that power again, stop whining about WAPA and DEMAND the power of the Sun be ours … not the power of the greed. We can win this one.
