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The reality of global climate change is not something you can feel with your hands or feel a deep connection to as you gaze into its chocolate brown eyes; the reality of it is something that is hardly detectable to our senses as a species - the time frame over which the change occurs isn't relevant to us, OR it doesn't register in our memory spans. That's why it's difficult for us to grasp and react to in any sort of coherent or effective way. Despite my senses, I have been convinced of the truth of global warming... the key: the appropriate scale for examining phenomena is that of relevance, whether it be at the sub-micron scale or over a span of millenia. It's not necessarily anthropocentric! Here is my story, concrete and irrefutable. Please consider, mull over, or fodder your thought with the subtleties herein:

Finally, after being stuck with nothing to do in camp for four days because of cloudy weather, after making increasingly complicated and intricate meals that dirtied as many dishes as possible, after exhausting our stores of stories, we have made our fourth camp move in a Twin Otter plane to a safe spot on Mercer Ice stream. "We" were four: Dr. G, a young and brilliant geophysical glaciologist from Canada; A., a Russian mountaineer and engineer living in Texas; Professor C, a prominent glaciology modeler; and myself, a recent geology graduate. We're here to put another piece into the puzzle of what makes glaciers move or stop. If you're interested I'll tell you about that later...

We have been living in Antarctica (south pole with penguins, NOT polar bears) for over a month. We have slept for the last three weeks in unheated Scott tents in cots & sleeping bags; not a shower between us in this time. Now summer, the sun never sets; temperatures here have stayed between -2 and -25C. This is the coldest I have ever been, but A. is always cheerfully comfortable with a few less layers of clothes than I wear. Year-round this part of the land is covered in a kilometer or so thick of moving ice that constantly moves to the Ross Sea. (The average ice thickness for the continent is 7000m). Every day we melt some of this ice, turning 5 gallons of it into one gallon of water to cook, drink, clean. (The ice isn't snow; we're in the desert where it snows less than a meter a year. It's technically something else.) We cook on a Coleman stove in the circus-hued Explorer tent that serves as our kitchen, living room, dining room, & office. At our new camp we

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