Can More Snowfall Save Patagonia’s Glaciers from the Impacts of Global Warming?
Sometimes, life has a way to surprise you.
2020 wasn’t an easy year for anyone. For us, it came with lots of mixed feelings and events. On the one hand, we welcomed our firstborn right before the Pandemic hit lockdown level. I wasn’t happy about taking him to daycare at six weeks old, so being able to telework and spend his first year together was an invaluable gift.
However, things weren’t all perfect on our side. Right after we had moved from Atlanta to a college town in the Midwest, where I was given a Visiting Assistant Professor position, we got a call from my husband’s family. Her mother was dying.
We didn’t hesitate to pack up everything, finalize our baby’s passport paperwork in the most epic way, and fly to his home country, where we ended up spending three months helping the family.
In a way, we were lucky that we didn’t have a cat or a dog to care for, so our arrangements were a lot simpler. But we did have a saltwater tank. We managed to find someone to come feed the fish, but maintenance was postponed until we returned.
On our way back after three months overseas, we were quite scared about the tank. Would we find anything still alive? Corals are very sensitive to abrupt changes and usually require weekly maintenance. Three months was way beyond what we were comfortable with, but family was more important.
To our surprise, though, most of the tank was completely alive. It was nasty, don’t get me wrong, but alive. However, we knew that it couldn’t have survived many more weeks, so we returned at the right time.
What about the Earth’s landscapes? As the planet warms, some ecosystems seem to be surviving. But is this going to be the case forever? What would happen if we fail to act and we cross a point of no return, a tipping point?
In The Story of the Dinosaurs in 25 Discoveries, Dr. Donald R. Prothero tells the fascinating stories behind the most important fossil finds and the intrepid researchers who unearthed them.
In twenty-five vivid vignettes, he weaves together dramatic tales of dinosaur discoveries with what modern science now knows about the species to which they belong.
This is a must-read for anyone interested in dinosaurs and the history behind how we came to understand their past world.
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