【推荐1】The water off the coast of northwest Greenland is a glass-like calm, but the puddles (水坑) on the region’s icebergs are a sign that a transformation is underway higher on the ice sheet.

Several days of unusually warm weather in northern Greenland have caused rapid melting, made visible by the rivers of meltwater rushing into the ocean. Temperatures have been running around 60 degrees Fahrenheit — 10 degrees warmer than normal for this time of year, scientists said.

The amount of ice that melted in Greenland between July 15 and 17 this year alone — 6 billion tons of water per day — would be enough to fill 7.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Each summer, scientists worry that they will see a repeat of the record melting that occurred in 2019, when 532 billion tons of ice flowed out into the sea. An unexpectedly hot spring and a July heat wave that year caused almost the entire ice sheet’s surface to melt. Global sea level rose permanently by 1.5 millimeters as a result.

Greenland holds enough ice — if it all melted — to lift sea level by 7.5 meters around the world. The latest research points to a more and more threatening situation on the Northern Hemisphere’s iciest island.

“Unprecedented (史无前例的)” rates of melting have been observed at the bottom of the Greenland ice sheet, a study published in February found, caused by huge quantities of meltwater flowing down from the surface. This water is particularly concerning because it can destabilize the sheet above it and could lead to a massive, rapid loss of ice.

And in 2020, scientists found that Greenland’s ice sheet had melted beyond the point of no return. The rate of melting in recent years exceeds anything Greenland has experienced in the last 12,000 years, another study found — and enough to cause measurable change in the gravitational field over Greenland.

At the East Greenland Ice-core Project — or EastGRIP — research camp in northwest Greenland, the work of scientists to understand the impact of climate change is being affected by climate change itself.

Aslak Grinsted, a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, said that they have been trying to get flights into the camp but the warmth is destabilizing the landing site.

Before human-caused climate change kicked in, temperatures near 32 degrees Fahrenheit there were unheard of. But since the 1980s, this region has warmed by around 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit per decade — four times faster than the global pace — making it all the more likely that temperatures will cross the melting point.

【推荐2】“A lot of the time when climate change is discussed in mainstream media, people are asking ‘can humans overcome this?’, or ‘what technology can solve this?’. It’s high time we recognized that animals also have to adapt to various changes. We know some animals change their skin colors to escape from natural enemies or due to environment pollution,” says Ryding. “The climate change that we have created is putting a lot of pressure on them, and some species try to adapt by shapeshifting (变形). ”

Strong shapeshifting has particularly been reported in birds. Several species of Australian parrot have shown, on average, a 4%—10% increase in beak (鸟喙) size since 1871, and this is positively linked with the summer temperature each year. North American dark-eyed juncos, a type of small songbird, had a link between increased beak size and short-term temperature extremes in cold environments. There have also been reported changes in mammalian species. Researchers have reported tail length increases in wood mice and leg size increases in masked shrews (鼩鼱).

“The increases in some body parts size we see so far are quite small—less than 10%—so the changes are unlikely to be immediately noticeable,” says Ryding. “However, some body parts such as ears are predicted to increase.”

Ryding intends to investigate shapeshifting in Australian birds firsthand by 3D scanning museum bird specimens from the past 100 years. It will give her team a better understanding of which birds are changing their body parts and why. “Shapeshifting does not mean that animals are coping with climate change and that all is ‘fine’,” says Ryding. “It just means they are adapting to survive it—but we’re not sure what the other ecological consequences of these changes are, or indeed that all species are capable of changing and surviving. ”

【推荐1】I met a beautiful soul yesterday. I went to work with my computer to a local cafe so that I could have dinner there. It was raining a bit this time and also I was among people. Sometimes when you work from home all day this is in itself a treat. And the magic of connection sometimes happens — a smile, someone offering you the newspaper, a short conversation with the staff, a peace dove flying past and lots of possibilities for love and kindness.

Well, magic did happen. I heard a man who was speaking with difficulty and very loud. I noticed he could not speak so clearly and he had some kind of impairment (损伤). As often happened, people looked at him-or avoided doing so-and then-as if embarrassed or afraid — looked down. In these cases I try to do the opposite. I imagined a person in these circumstances would want to feel included.

So I decided to deliberately look at him and smile. It was an instant! He looked at me, smiled and immediately said hello. With a combination of spoken and body language he asked if he could approach me. I agreed. He introduced me to his friend who taught sign language online and explained that they were both deaf, after which he even told me about his wife and how he loved teaching. I apologized for not knowing sign language and hoped I’d learnt. We still managed to have a beautiful conversation which made us all very happy. I’m sure we’ll meet again to experience the magic of being and being with others.