April 17, 2017

Call the electrician

editor:	Gurmeet Singh

Easter celebrations always seem to be a little less ritualistic than Christmas - there's no presents under the tree, etc. You may have found yourself on an egg-hunt, or perhaps in a Church, or even found yourself just getting hammered with a bunch of mates until the early hours. So many days off, why not use them, eh? Over the weekend, the US and North Korea celebrated the holidays by almost bringing the world to a nuclear, or semi-nuclear conflict, the US dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb on a small group of ISIS fighters, Turkey's Erdogan swept the board and took a whole range of new powers for himself through a dodgy-looking referendum, and the French election race which could decide the fate of the European Union, took a sharp swing to the socialist left.

Well, those were the headlines, what about the news? Well, it seems that due to a small electrical mishap, about 80,000 years of Earth history went up in - not smoke exactly - but it melted.

"A freezer malfunction at the University of Alberta in Edmonton has melted part of the world’s largest collection of ice cores from the Canadian Arctic, reducing some of the ancient ice into puddles."

The ice cores contained evidence of atmospheric change, which in turn could tell scientists about the history of the globe's climate and why and when climactic events occurred. By melting the ice, the team unfortunately lost the opportunity to do that.

It seems that just a few days after drilling and transporting the ice at an enormous cost to the university's new facility, where the freezer tripped a high-heat alarm, melting the ice. While none of the cores were completely destroyed, around 22,000 years of history was melted off one, and 16,000 melted off another.

It might not seem like the biggest tragedy, considering all that's going on in the world, but I thought it was a fitting metaphor for the way in which the planet is changing right now - heat melting all the ice, even accidentally, and melting, along with it, all of recent history.

But it's not to depress you - you know what you can do to help combat climate change, and there's still time. Enjoy the rest of the holidays!