Hasta La Gadget!

Bill Nye may be serious about climate change, but he’s not above using a little dark humor to spotlight the serious threat that rising temperatures pose to our national parks.

Speaking in Brooklyn, New York, on Monday at an event marking the centennial of the National Park Service, Nye turned his focus to Montana’s Glacier National Park, one of the most threatened among the service’s 412 parks and other protected areas and monuments.

“The company line is the glaciers will be gone by the year 2030,” Nye told HuffPost. “There’ll still be snowfields because it still will snow … but the glaciers themselves will be gone. So it will be Sandy Hillside National Park.”

Ouch. (See the moment in the video above.)

Funny or not, “the Science Guy” seems to be spot-on in his assessment of the situation at Glacier, a 1,600-square-mile wilderness that features hundreds of lakes and streams and is home to a range of animals, including grizzlies, elk and mountain goats.

In 1850, Glacier is estimated to have had 150 glaciers, most of which were present when the park was formally established in 1910. As of 2010, there were a mere 25 glaciers that covered more than 25 acres. 

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And Glacier isn’t the only national park that’s imperiled by climate change. A 2014 study of the parks between 1901 and 2012 found that parks are now “overwhelmingly at the extreme warm end of historical temperature distributions.” 

Temperatures aren’t rising in isolation, of course. Sea levels are rising too. Extreme weather is increasingly common, as are wildfires. Each of these forces is exacting a toll on parks across the country, from the die-off of trees in California’s Sequoia National Park to the loss of marshlands (and alligators) in Everglades National Park. And, of course, Glacier’s glaciers.

“We are starting to see things spiral away now,” Gregor Schuurman, an ecologist at the NPS climate change response program, told The Guardian. 

Given how bleak the situation seems to be, Nye’s dark humor may be the only sensible response.

Then again, there’s still plenty to enjoy in our parks ― and you can get in for free Aug. 25-28. Click here to find a park near you.

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THIS JUST IN! Trae Pierce and the T-Stone Band blew the roof off the Green Parrot!

‘I expected to find a crater when I came back today!’ laughed John Vagnoni, co-owner/overseer of the GP, and the man with the incredible ear who selects the bands. Not a day passes he doesn’t receive CDs from hopefuls requesting to play.

John must be breaking a lot of hearts. Daily mountains of submissions arrive and he has to mine for the diamonds.

I asked him if he’s ever made anyone cry when turning them down, and he said, ‘I hope not!’

John mixes things up and these days on Sundays, from noon to 4pm Captain Blues, a local treasure, takes the stage and anyone with an instrument and any courage can join an impromptu jazzy/bluesy band. Captain Blues leads meanwhile belting out tunes.

See Captain Blues here doing Otis Redding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4ahAAG5yTA

Because Trae Pierce, who has won 4 Grammys, is a generous man, for the last set of the weekend, Sunday Sound Check, as they call it from 5pm to 7pm, he gave the microphone to Captain Blues and when the Captain was done Trae graciously said, ‘You weren’t supposed to outdo me!’

Fact is Trae Pierce and The T-Stone Band are loaded with supersonic talent and since they visited last time all of town has been clamoring for their return.

Please look them up on their website www.traepierceandthetstoneband.com and/or iTunes.

Keyboard player David D1 Grant assures me the release date for their new single is merely months away and a whole album can be expected in 2017. Yay!

Along with my first love www.Xperimento.com, TPTS is now permanently on the biannual trek to remote Key West. We’re grateful for the quality willing to travel to our faraway isle. Just another reason why Key West is the best.

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Rising temperatures can’t fully explain the ongoing melting of the Greenland ice sheet. A new project looks at how microorganisms are changing the reflectivity of the ice sheet, helping it warm and melt.

One summer, about four years ago, Martyn Tranter, a biogeochemist at the University of Bristol in the U.K., was working on the margins of the Greenland ice sheet with a group of new students and postdocs when he sat down to take a break. The glacier goggles Tranter usually wore to protect his eyes from the sunlight were broken, so he was wearing his cycling glasses instead. As Tranter looked across the ice surface, eating his sandwich and drinking a cup of tea, he realized the ice in front of him was tinted mauve.

“It was everywhere I looked,” he said. “I turned to the guys and said ‘I think this rotten [melting] ice is full of microbes.’ And they all just burst out laughing.” But shortly afterward, microbiologist Marian Yallop, also from the University of Bristol, found pigmented algae at the site, confirming Tranter’s suspicions.

The discovery launched a £3 million ($4 million) Black and Bloom project to examine the role that microbes might have in darkening the Greenland ice sheet – and boosting its melt.

Greenland is one of the world’s largest pieces of melting ice. It loses ice to the ocean as icebergs peel off the glaciers that run into the sea and when water runs off the melting surface. The winter snowfall adds ice back onto the ice sheet, but over the past several years, Greenland has been shedding more ice than it has gained.

The scale of the ice loss is staggering. Since, 2002 the Greenland ice sheet has lost an estimated 3,500 billion tonnes (3,860 billion tons) of ice, an average of 270 billion tonnes (300 billion tons) per year – equivalent to a little less than 1mm of sea level rise annually. For the most part, the erosion has been steady, but in 2012 more than 600 billion tonnes (660 billion tons) of ice were jettisoned in a single year. If fully melted, it would add about 7m (23ft) to global sea levels.

In addition to raising sea levels, the meltwater can swell nearby rivers and put communities and infrastructure at risk. In July 2012, meltwater overflowed the banks of the Watson River near Kangerlussuaq, which hosts the island’s busiest airport, and washed out roads and bridges.

Lately, surface melting has become a major contributor to Greenland’s ice loss. “Usually it is split 50-50,” says Marco Tedesco, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, in Palisades, New York. “But it is becoming 60 to 70 percent – in 2012 you have a huge loss from surface melting.” Tedesco, who spoke at an event sponsored by SEARCH (Study of Environmental Arctic Change) in July, says that as much as 12 percent more of its surface is melting today than it did in 1979. “That’s roughly the size of Kansas.”

Rising temperatures can’t fully explain the increased melt. Over time, the surface of the Greenland ice sheet has become darker and less reflective. Soot and mineral dust that settle on the surface are among the culprits. So too is the melting ice itself, which creates pools of water that absorb more solar energy than the ice. But only in recent years have scientists also discovered that vast algae blooms covering the ice sheet are also darkening it.

The algae form colorful quilts across the ice surface, in hues that range from greens to purples to reds and browns. Preliminary studies suggest that ice dusted with these pigmented algae has a reduced reflectivity of 10 to 20 percent, says Tranter. “But it may not be all because of the algae. They might be attached to particulates and black carbon, and they might be trapping dust at the surface,” he says. Part of the Black and Bloom project is to understand what these blooms contain, as well as what controls their growth.

The Black and Bloom team will spend six weeks on the ice sheet this summer, focused on the “dark zone” of the Greenland ice sheet – an area in the southwest margin that has been darkening for the past 15–20 years, and has been previously studied by the Dark Snowgroup, led by Jason Box, a professor with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

“We are trying to unpick the dominant factor that is causing the darkening. My guess is that it is a combination of factors, and that it just might be that the dust helps fertilize greater algal growth,” says Tranter. They’ll also send unmanned aerial vehicles across the surface to measure the albedo (“whiteness”) from different altitudes.

That data will ultimately be fed into models to make better predictions about the future of the Greenland ice sheet. “At the moment, the ice sheet is the biggest mass contributor to sea level rise, and it looks like the rate of melt is accelerating,” says Tranter. “If you want to predict 30 to 40 years into the future, you need to know the mechanisms and processes that are driving that melt.

This article originally appeared on Arctic Deeply. For weekly updates about Arctic geopolitics, economy, and ecology, you can sign up to the Arctic Deeply email list.

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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In the centuries before refrigeration, folks cooked up some pretty inventive (or, shall we say, strange) ways of preserving fresh food. We took a look at several methods for keeping uncooked eggs fresh for years on end–at least according to a 19th-century magazine and some half-crazy people who have attempted, despite modern technology, to put these time-honored techniques to the test.

Plus: The Modern Farmer Guide to Grocery Store Eggs

Yep, down the Internet rabbit hole we went–and here’s what we’ve returned with, just for you. First, a few caveats: These methods are designed for chicken eggs (though we imagine they’d work just as well for duck eggs, too).We haven’t personally tested any of these methods for keeping eggs fresh (nor, ultimately, do we recommend them). But if you’re into experimenting, and you live in the United States, use farm-fresh eggs (that are clean and free of cracks), as opposed to store-bought ones. When a hen lays eggs, they have a naturally occurring coating, called a cuticle or bloom, that prevents bacteria from getting in and moisture from getting out. In the U.S., commercial egg producers are required, per USDA regulations, to power wash eggs prior to selling them, which rinses that coating away.

We’ve learned of at least a half-dozen ways to store eggs for long periods of time. Not surprisingly, most of these methods date back long before the invention of the refrigerator. Some originated in the 1700s or earlier.

Plus: UK Supermarkets Moving to Cage-Free Eggs–But What Does That Mean?

Turns out, we aren’t the only people who get into this stuff. Jas. Townsend & Son, Inc., an Indiana-based company that specializes in things like 18th-century reproduction clothing and accessories for Revolutionary War re-enactors, covers such topics on its YouTube series. (Earlier this summer, they broke the Internet with an 18th-century fried chicken recipe.) The video that piqued our interest details the best ways to preserve raw eggs based on 18th-century practices. The company’s president, Jonathan Townsend, wearing colonial-era garb, details the various tricks: Apparently, storing eggs in salt water makes the eggs salty. Storing them in wheat bran makes the eggs taste musty–and after eight months 70 percent of the eggs went bad. Then there’s wood ash, which made the eggs taste like a campfire. That doesn’t sound so bad, and in their experiment, only 20 percent of the eggs spoiled. Other practices included coating eggs in varnish, butter, or rendered animal fat (which had a 40 percent failure rate).

Reddit user Mr. Bungles claimed that he was able to keep eggs fresh for more than a year, by coating them in mineral oil and storing them in the fridge. Technically, does the use of modern technology negate this one? Whatever: “I was planning on letting it go until it failed a float test. But one of my kids ended up eating it, and at that point it was about a week away from being in the fridge for 3 years,” wrote Mr. Bungles on a homesteading subreddit.

An 1862 edition of the Genesee Farmer, a monthly agricultural journal out of Rochester, New York, dedicated a few pages to egg preservation. The piece says one “excellent method” for preserving eggs is to store them in a solution of quicklime, salt, and cream of tartar, which the writer claims can preserve eggs for up to two years.

Plus: How to Incubate Chicken Eggs

According to Townsend’s video, though, one method stood out. He says the best way to preserve raw eggs is to store them in a solution of slaked lime (you can find it at a building supply store) and water, which, in his test, had a 100 percent success rate after eight months. That same Genesee Farmer article claimed this method could preserve eggs for six years or longer.

That’s a mighty long time to wait for an omelette.

More from Modern Farmer:
Meet a Woman Who Keeps 500 Plants in Her Brooklyn Apartment
In Austin, A New Mobile Farmers Market Will Travel to Food Deserts
Chef Christian Puglisi’s Ambitious New Project is a “Farm of Ideas”
Should Agriculture Be a Required School Subject?
Flea Loves Bees: The Red Hot Chili Peppers Bassist is an Avid Apiarist

Also on HuffPost:

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Feyisa Lilesa, the marathon runner who made an anti-government protest gesture during the Olympic Games, has not returned to Ethiopia. Reporters aboard the Ethiopian team’s return flight from Rio yesterday (Aug 24) said Lilesa was not on the plane.

Sports officials did not mention the 26-year-old’s name during a welcome ceremony where government officials greeted the team and decorated them with garlands. Ethiopian state media also omitted mention of him in news reports of the athletes’ return. Lilesa’s agent, Federico Rosa, said the athlete had stayed on in Rio but that he does not know Lilesa’s plans.

During the men’s marathon race on Aug. 21, the last day of the Games, Lilesa held his arms over his head and crossed his wrists as he passed through the finish line, in a sign of solidarity with anti-government protestors. Lilesa is a member of the Oromo, the country’s largest ethnic group, who have been demonstrating against what they see as the government’s marginalization of their culture and land rights since last year. Recently, the second largest ethnic group, the Amhara, have also joined in.

Afterwards, Lilesa who won silver in the race, said he feared for his life if he were to return, though Ethiopian authorities said he would be welcomed back as a hero. The runner said he was considering extending his stay in Brazil or moving to the United States or Kenya. A crowd funding campaign that claims to be raising money for the athlete and his family has raised almost all of its $150,000 goal.

This article originally appeared on Quartz Africa. Sign up for the Quartz Africa Weekly Brief — the most important and interesting news from across the continent, in your inbox.

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