‘When the Glaciers Disappear, Those Species Will Go Extinct’

Perhaps on mobile the experience is missing, but on my desktop the article is able to convey its message through pictures, sentences and short paragraphs.

claudius• 7 years ago

Also on a desktop, I had to "restart" reading everytime I scrolled through a whole page. Lost interest, which is quite a shame because the content seems actually interesting and some of the pictures are very pretty, but the reading experience is just abysmal.

pupdogg• 7 years ago

I believe more time was spent on formatting the page HTML/CSS than research on the subject matter itself.

theon144• 7 years ago

Considering how often NYTimes publishes essays in this format, I doubt it.

amelius• 7 years ago

Is there a name for this kind of experience, where scrolling triggers different kinds of animation?

JustSomeNobody• 7 years ago

I can think of a few choice words.

citeguised• 7 years ago

Scrollytelling

RandallBrown• 7 years ago

I do.

The pictures are as much a part of the story as the words and this format lets the pictures be a part of the flow of reading.

I think it's fantastic on mobile and desktop.

o10449366• 7 years ago

I did a web scraping project of all major news publications in the US and the NYT was by far the most difficult to parse because their article structures are extremely arbitrary and inconsistent.

justforfunhere2• 7 years ago

off topic: The researchers featured in this article are out in the wild, collecting samples, making observations etc. That seems to be the complete opposite of the desk jobs that people in software have. Come to think of it, even though there is lot of money in software, but I don't think you ever get to know the world around you or enjoy life better than say a geologist or similar jobs.

keiferski• 7 years ago

Ever since watching The Life Aquatic ~15 years ago, I’ve secretly wanted to throw all my computers away and become a marine biologist.

veryworried• 7 years ago

When you are working in software, you are not “sitting at a desk”, you’re sitting at the helm of the future. All of the advancements and evolution of mankind and life on this earth have led us to the creation of civilization’s most important tool: the computer. And as computers weave more into the fabric of our world and everyday life, those who master them wield power like Gods. There’s no place I’d rather be.

anonymou2• 7 years ago

Thankfully there is free (as in freedom) software. It is as important as ever that it exists, it is our only hope to stop these "gods".

ianstallings2• 7 years ago

I've spent a lot of time in software and I am looking to exit so I can spend more time away from the desk, but I have to say - this is a great attitude to have!

saiya-jin• 7 years ago

Could be true, or not. You could head out to wilderness every weekend, on vacations (probably further away), move closer to it etc. And researcher can head down to nearest pub or TV with netflix after work. You can travel where you actually want, not where the job takes you (although this specific one covers pretty cool locations).

scarejunba2• 7 years ago

Nah, when I vacation I can go there if I like it. These people have to go certain places.

My friend is a marine biologist and she dives off tropical islands in beautiful blue ocean water. The other day she talked about how everyone said it must be amazing to live this life so close to nature and she said it's really fucking hard not to flip out. The job is hard and painful and to be honest, my job as a software engineer is way better because I get to have fun wherever I want two days a week.

prittgluestick• 7 years ago

I've considered just quitting and wandering around countries on foot. I've got the money from software saved up to do it. And I live cheaply anyways.

1121redblackgo• 7 years ago

Do it.

Kiro• 7 years ago

I don't want to know the world and I don't enjoy going outside. My life is perfect in front of the computer and I'm kind of offended that you presume everyone wants that kind of life.

steve_adams_86• 7 years ago

I struggle with this occasionally. My partner is a hydrographer and her job is to create electronic navigation charts for the Western Canadian and Arctic coastline. This involves surveying the waters, studying tides, and generating the charts from all of the data. Sometimes she gets to go for weeks or a month at a time on the surveying boats, or they fly out to check on remote tide stations.

The rest of her time is much like ours, just sitting at a desk tapping away at a keyboard or mouse. But 1.5-2 months of her year are booked by her employer to be off surveying. They see whales, go fishing and dive for food in their spare time, visit remote waters in the arctic or BC coast, stay in interesting communities along the coast, and all kinds of neat stuff.

Of course it isn't perfect and the ~10 months spent charting is so tedious that it gives me mild discomfort from a distance. I think the value of having quality navigation charts for the ocean is a little known but incredibly important asset to any place in the world though. Vessels travelling safely is the backbone of trade, tourism, fishing, and many kinds of recreation. I suspect there's some satisfaction in that at least.

ianstallings2• 7 years ago

I've spent 24 years writing software professionally and I often think about my exit. I don't think I'll ever stop writing software, I truly love it. But the career itself is incredibly stressful. The money is compensation for that stress, but I'd much rather be outside and working with my hands. I'm going to create other channels of income and then move on.

It's not that I think people can't be happy at a desk. I've been very happy. Just looking for a change and some sunshine.

AlotOfReading• 7 years ago

I do archaeology in-between software jobs. The pay is terrible, but there's an attraction to working outside on something meaningful that's hard to ignore. At the same time, washing clothes in rivers and being sick in the field sucks.

lowken102• 7 years ago

Did you know that Canada was once a tropical climate? I'm just saying it's possible that the earth's climate has been changing for billions of years and will continue to change after they take away our freedom by placing a tax on energy.

ZeroFries4• 7 years ago

Oil is way, way cheaper than its real value. If you had to produce oil from scratch, it would cost far more. If we use it willy-nilly, we're impinging on the freedom of future people. There has to be a balance, here.

mbrumlow5• 7 years ago

Your wording makes me cringe. People don't have "freedom" to use or have access to things in the sense you are suggesting. Its not a fundamental right to have and use Oil. In its extreme you are basically asking people to suffer today so that maybe some future people might not suffer. It is completely unattainable because the future is always in the future -- and largely unknown. So people will have to continue to suffer and make sacrifices because of the near unlimited "future people".

I can't remember the source, but I think it was a fairly well known economist. He has the position that prices for things always go up, so in effect using Oil now will always be cheaper than using oil in the future.

ChrisClark2• 7 years ago

Yes, the Earth changes slowly, and has been changing slowly for millions of years.

Until it stopped changing slowly, and started changing 100x faster, in the past 50ish years.

dispat0r2• 7 years ago

Please proof that claim. 100x faster never. And faster warming compared to which period. We are still in at the tail end of an ice age so warming is expected.

arethuza• 7 years ago

Where was it on the globe when the climate was like that - continents do move around rather a lot.

SketchySeaBeast2• 7 years ago

Yeah, at that point Canada was seated in the Atlantic between what is now Mexico, South America, and Africa.

jonawesomegreen• 7 years ago

I really like this XKCD diagram to give a sense of scale of how fast things are changing: https://xkcd.com/1732/

patrickg_zill• 7 years ago

Greenland glacier called Jakobshavn, the largest in the north Atlantic, is growing in size after decreasing for several years. It's almost like there's a cycle...

twright• 7 years ago

"Turn off the alarms everyone, this part of the building isn't on fire."

It takes more than a few data-points to declare a trend reversed, especially one this big. In the paper I believe you're referring to they even conclude:

Despite the slowdown and thickening we report here, glacier flow still exceeds the velocities of the early 1990s, when the mass balance of the glacier was nearly in equilibrium, and continues to contribute to Greenland’s net ice mass loss. [1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0329-3

drharby• 7 years ago

I think you ate not genuinely interpreting your parents message. Theres alarms and then theres reasons to ve concerned about the future.

Why so damn hostile to an otherwise decent observation

0xcafecafe• 7 years ago

When the Titanic was sinking, one part of it did go away from water at first.

ScottFree• 7 years ago

"When the Glaciers Disappear"

90 Percent Of The World’s Glaciers Are GROWING - https://principia-scientific.org/climate-shock-90-percent-wo...

The source for the link isn't some crackpot either. It's NASA.

imgabe• 7 years ago

If you read the NASA source, it is talking only about Antarctica. NASA doesn't say anything about this being "90% of the world's glaciers". That is inserted by the author who is commenting on the NASA study, and is unsupported.

It is entirely possible that the Antarctic ice is growing while the Arctic is shrinking. That doesn't mean that there is no consequence to the loss of Arctic ice, or that it won't cause extinctions and a shift in climate in the Arctic.

leftyted• 7 years ago

It's still interesting that Antarctic ice is growing (according to this study at least). I've certainly never heard that before. In fact I've heard lots about Antarctic ice melting.

From the NASA press release:

“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”

Apparently the study contradicts the IPCC report in a pretty significant way. The press release does mention that the trend is not good, but the idea that Antarctica is gaining ice is news to me.

iamcurious• 7 years ago

“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-o...

wil421• 7 years ago

You could’ve linked to the NASA study[1] instead of a dubious sounding website with an arictle written by “iceagenow.com”.

according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years -- I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”

[1]https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-o...

SketchySeaBeast2• 7 years ago

https://www.skepticalscience.com/increasing-Antarctic-Southe...

Just because something is happening in one location isn't evidence of something else happening in another. It's also not evidence against global warming, to quote your article even:

“That is what is SUPPOSED to happen when there is global warming,” says @Smaulgld. “Glaciers get bigger unless they melt -that’s global warming too.”

alwaysanagenda• 7 years ago

From Wikipedia:

"More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to have died out. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described. In 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one percent described."

Life is a cycle. Glaciers are a cycle.

mg794613• 7 years ago

Maybe it's a interesting article, but I guess I'll never know because I am missing half ot the text because of this "beautiful scrolling feature"

‘When the Glaciers Disappear, Those Species Will Go Extinct’

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