image: This image shows the retreat of the Columbia Glacier, Alaska, USA, by ~6.5 km between 2009 and 2015. view more
Credit: Photo credit: James Balog and the Extreme Ice Survey.
Boulder, Colorado, USA: Climate is changing -- there should be zero doubt about this circa 2017. The outstanding issue for the geoscience community has been how we best portray to this to the public. In their GSA Today article posted online on 30 March 2017, a team of experts in the field -- Patrick Burkhart, Richard Alley, Lonnie. Thompson, James Balog, Paul E. Baldauf, and Gregory S. Baker -- present an exceptional example.
With contrasting photographs, they document the loss of ice across Earth's surface, an almost assured consequence of anthropogenic carbon emissions. One cannot dismiss it -- the photographs don't lie. The real problem for geoscientists is what we are going to do about, when much of our science and society lies intertwined with fossil fuels.
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ARTICLE
Savor the Cryosphere
GSA Today, v. 27, doi: 10.1130/GSATG293A.1
Contact: Patrick A. Burkhart, Dept. of Geography, Geology, and the Environment, Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania 16057, USA; patrick.burkhart@sru.edu.
GSA Today articles are open access online; for a print copy, please contact Kea Giles. Please discuss articles of interest with the authors before publishing stories on their work, and please make reference to GSA Today in articles published.
Journal
GSA Today