Remember playing with that old Etch-a-Sketch? You know what I liked about it? No matter how much I messed up the image I was attempting to create, I could always just shake it up and start anew. Also, I knew how temporary and fleeting even the most perfect image would be. If OlyBlog is an Etch-a-Sketch, I think we just shook it up and are starting clean. A new year. A new start. Change can be a good thing.

Rick's brainchild will improve as a result of these growing pains. We have a great group of people here.

The part of the carbon cycle I have been thinking about for the past few days is the ocean storage element.

As carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere in larger concentrations it also starts to build at greater levels in sea water. This is not so good.  The bipeds on the planet have used the waterways as dumpsters for thousands and thousands of years. Some of what we have dumped in the water has really not been a problem. Organic compounds that break down easily in amounts that the waterways can breakdown are essentially inconsequential. But as we bipeds have started creating more complex materials that are less easily broken down, we have started to create a bit of a mess in the waterways. One of the most striking examples of that sort of thing was the day in June 1969 when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught on fire. The actual 1969 Cuyahoga River fire was somewhat apocryphal, but still it's a feature of a certain biped's impact on rivers that any river, anywhere, can actually support combustion. In a more natural state, I don't think you could get a river to burn with a blowtorch.

Anyway....

Despite the better jpegs available when a river catches on fire, I am thinking about the less news-worthy, but more catastrophic picture of oceans dying. And this slow ocean death is at least partly based on the build up of carbon in the oceans.

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Published: 30 December 2006

A vast ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic has broken up, a further sign of the astonishing rate at which polar ice is now melting because of global warming.

The Ayles ice shelf, more than 40 square miles in extent - over five times the size of central London - has broken clear from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic, it emerged yesterday.

The broken shelf has formed an ice island, in what a leading scientist described as a "dramatic and disturbing event", citing climate change as the cause.

The news caps a dramatic year of discovery about just how quickly the polar ice is disappearing.

It comes as America's leading climate scientist, James Hansen, warns in today's Independent that the Earth is being turned into "a different planet" because of the continuing increase in man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.

The break-up of the Ayles shelf occurred 16 months ago, in an area so remote it was not at first detected. "This is a dramatic and disturbing event," said Professor Warwick Vincent of Laval University in Quebec City. "It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years."Ice shelves float on the sea, but are connected to land (as opposed to ice sheets, which are wholly land-based). In the past five years, several ice shelves along the fringes of the Antarctic peninsula have started to become unstable or break up. The most spectacular was the 2002 collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf, the size of Luxembourg.

Rick Reichert, CFRE, a candidate for director of development at Evergreen, will be on campus for interviews onWednesday, January 3.  There will be an open interview session with Rick from 12 to 12:45 pm that day in SEM 2 E2109.

Evergreen’s director of development works with Advancement staff and other campus leaders to design, organize, and implement a comprehensive fundraising program for Evergreen that includes the college’s annual fund and major individual, corporate and foundation gifts.  The person in this position works closely with the director of alumni affairs, director of college relations and the planned giving officer.  Funds raised by the director of development and other Advancement staff pay for scholarships, faculty development, curriculum projects, facilities improvements, student activities, artistic and cultural enrichment, and public service.

via OMJP: