Tag: climate change
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How high is the sea?
SEA levels are rising; it is one of the great worries of our age. But what are they rising relative to? Why, sea level of course. But how high is that…? This article first appeared in New Scientist on 8 February 2017. To continue reading, click here (paywall).
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Searching for Doggerland
WHEN signs of a lost world at the bottom of the North Sea first began to appear, no one wanted to believe them. The evidence started to surface a century and a half ago, when fishermen along the Dutch coast widely adopted a technique called beam trawling. They dragged weighted nets across the seafloor and…
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Glacier prayer
YOU’VE got to hand it to the Catholic church, sometimes its methods work. In 1678, the inhabitants of Fiesch in the Swiss canton of Valais, exasperated with the glaciers that loomed ever larger over their village, swallowing up their pasturage, inaugurated an annual pilgrimage. The hope was to banish the ice forms with chants, prayers…