Complimentary Blueberry Juice

The sea is the gift that keeps on giving this winter (and it is rare to have so reliable a subject as an amateur nature photographer). The lesson learned from last week is that visiting the same place every day allows nature to reveal herself slowly and gain new appreciations for the forces that shape our surroundings. However I promptly ignored my own advice and stopped going…the temperature warmed, it went up to 3 and 4C, I assumed, the ice melted and the phenomenon was over.

Now it’s time for some humble tea, to bundle up, go back to returning to Uunisaari daily to watch the amazing things unfolding on the Gulf of Finland.

That is until it cooled off again and even more stunning sights were to be found. After an incredibly windy day and freezing night, upon returning it appeared as if waves were frozen in time before they hit the shore…the gel-like ice coating the sea had frozen solid and shards of ice piled up on top of each other as though they were moved by tectonic force. To stand and listen to the shifting water caused eerie squeaking among the ice-plates.

And a few days later, a little snow and a little wind…and the surface had turned completely white with snow-like vapour trails forming little snow drifts. It appears as though this photo subject will remain for the following week at least.

A day after last week’s post, there was a timely article in The Guardian about the record ocean temperatures observed in 2023, and today, another about Greenland losing 20% more ice than previously thought, nearing irreversibility. It is of course contrary to our daily experience amidst polar vortex systems in winter that many scoff at the idea of human-caused climate change. Whether it is in the records of atmospheric composition records, the deepest of ice cores in the most remote glaciers, the shifting pH of the global ocean, or in the geologic evidence of rocks, all the data is there to draw accurate and startling conclusions about our near future. An existential truth is that 99% of the life that has ever lived on this planet has gone extinct, and Homo sapiens are not above this potential fate. The best I have heard this be described is that we are living during a time much like Galileo: all the evidence is there, but we as a culture and a society are not fully ready to accept it readily, either as information, nor its implications.

Today, I thought the photos of the ocean too beautiful not to share, and that future generations of humans may not have the ability to witness these sorts of phenomenon without travelling to the poles. This will be the last post on geologic climate patterns and next week, I will shift to biological ones, and explore how modern commodity agriculture is influencing biological evolution.

For a little closure poetically, I will close with Carl Sagan from Cosmos published in 1981:

“We are perturbing our poor planet in serious and contradictory ways…In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown….Our intelligence and our technology have given us the power to affect the climate. How will we use this power? Are we willing to tolerate ignorance and complacency in matters that affect the entire human family? Do we value short-term advantages above the welfare of the Earth? Or will we think on longer time scales, with concern for our children and our grandchildren, to understand and protect the complex life-support systems of our planet? The Earth is a tiny and fragile world. It needs to be cherished.“

You can watch the late great Carl Sagan’s testimony to US Congress on Climate Change from 1985 right here.

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice