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George Monbiot news@monbiot.com via google.com	6:10 PM (58 minutes ago)
to me

Unearthed

Posted: 23 Dec 2013 09:03 AM PST

A winter’s tale of guns, gold and greed.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 24th December 2013.

Perhaps I should have been more careful. Last year I decided that every Christmas I would tell a winter’s tale or two(1). Through a long history of doing stupid things, I’ve accumulated a stock of ripping yarns. But I failed to explain myself. Some people interpreted the tale I told last Christmas as making a political point about Travellers I had no intention of suggesting; a point that is in fact the opposite of what I believe(2). So please read what follows as a story and no more: true to the best of my knowledge and memory but without a polemical purpose.

I was told this tale by a gold prospector in the garimpos of Roraima: the illegal mines exacavated among the river gravels in the forests of northern Brazil. He and his friends swore it was true. Though parts of the story must have been filled in later, in the light of what I had seen I found it easy to believe.

To say that the mines were lawless is not quite correct. They stood outside the laws of the state, but had established their own codes, which were informed by power and honour and greed and lust. Every week, thieves were taken into the forest to be shot. Duels were fought on the airstrips, in which men took ten paces, turned and fired: the miners circulated Wild West comics and acted out scenes that might once have been mythical, but there became horribly real.

To illustrate the point, before we get to the tale itself: one evening João, a remarkable man from the north-east of Brazil, who, after leaving home at 14 then spending ten years crossing and recrossing the Amazon on foot, had found work as a minder for two prostitutes, took me and his charges to a bar at the end of the airstrip village in which I was staying. The bar and the strip of dirt were owned by Zé, a man who spent some of his vast earnings on causing trouble: roaming around with his band of pistoleiros, starting fights and roughing people up. Zé, in whose house I was staying (by his choice, not mine) was said to have killed five men, starting with his business partner: by this means he had acquired control of the airstrip, and the extortionate fees for landing and leaving.

The bar was a flimsy shack in which a ghetto blaster was turned up so high that you could scarcely hear the music. Ragged men swayed and lurched and sprawled across the more sober prostitutes. On every table there was a bottle or two of white rum and a revolver. The men who had stayed in their seats drummed their fingers nervously on the tabletops, halfway between their drinks and their guns. The door was shoved open, and Zé and his thugs walked in.

His was at all times an arresting presence: charming, mercurial and terrifying. A machete scar ran from one cheek, over his nose and across the other cheek. He wore a sawn-off denim jacket and two revolvers on his belt. He opened his arms and announced, in a voice loud enough to carry above the music, that he would buy drinks for everyone. Zé moved through the bar, slapping backs and shaking hands, flashing his gold teeth. João’s eyes darted around, watching people’s hands. Bottles of cachaça were passed down from the bar.

Suddenly João shoved me so hard that I almost fell off my chair. He grabbed my arm, managing at the same time to seize the two prostitutes, and propelled us towards the door. As we hurtled out of the bar it erupted in gunfire. Amazingly, only one man was killed: he was dragged onto the airstrip with a hole the size of an apple in his chest. He was one of an estimated 1,700 people murdered, in a community of 40,000, in just six months.

So here’s the story. Two men established a small stake in the mines, in a remote valley some distance from the nearest airstrip. They cut down the trees and began to excavate. They found the digging and hosing and sifting of the gravel exceedingly hard and, though they had discovered very little, they decided to hire two other men to do it for them. They agreed to split any findings equally with the workers. The two hired men dug for four months without success: with high pressure hoses they scoured great pits into which the trees collapsed; they turned the clear waters of the forest stream they excavated red with clay and tailings; they winnowed the gravel through meshed boxes; they dissolved the residues in mercury and burnt it off; but they produced almost nothing. Then they hit one of the richest deposits ever discovered in Roraima: in one day they extracted four kilos.

If you find a lot of gold in the garimpos you keep quiet – very quiet. A single shout of triumph can amount to suicide. You gather it up, hide it in your bag and explain to anyone who asks on your way out that months of work have brought you nothing but disease and misery. But first it must be divided.

The two men who owned the stake began to comprehend, for the first time, the implications of the deal they had done. “We risked our lives to establish this stake. We spent every cent we had – and plenty we didn’t – travelling here, buying the equipment and the diesel, hacking out a clearing in the forest, hiring these men. And now we have to split the gold equally with people who are no more than manual labourers, who would normally be paid a few dollars a day.” They told the two workers that they wanted a special meal that night, and sent them to the nearest airstrip to buy the ingredients.

As the two workers walked they began to ruminate. “We’ve nearly killed ourselves in that pit. We’ve been up before dawn every day and have worked until dusk. We’ve had malaria, foot rot, screw worm, sunstroke, while those two bastards have done nothing but lie in their hammocks shouting instructions. Now we’re expected to give them an equal share of the gold that we and we alone found.” When they reached the store, they bought cachaça, rice, beans, a packet of seasoning and a box of rat poison. They mixed the poison into the seasoning and set off back to the camp. Before they reached it, they were ambushed by the two owners and shot. The owners then picked up the bags and went back to the camp to celebrate over the first hot dinner they had had in weeks.

Some time later a party of men moving through the forest to look for new stakes walked into the camp. They found two skeletons over which vines were already beginning to creep. And four kilos of gold.

www.monbiot. com

References:

1. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/26/my-inner-anarchist-lost-out-bourgeois

Liquid water found in the Greenland ice sheet could affect estimates of future sea level rise.

Click to enlarge. This drill rig was used to extract firn cores from within the Greenland firn aquifer. One of the snowmobiles used in the 186 mile traverse of the ice sheet to reach the drill site. Clément Miège, University of Utah Ph.D. student and Terry Gacke, Ice Drilling Design and Operations. Courtesy: Evan Burgess

Click to enlarge. Water from the Greenland perennial firm aquifer draining from a core extracted 40 feet below the surface of the ice sheet in April, prior to seasonal melt, with air temperatures 5 degrees F confirming water was retained at depth throughout the winter. Courtesy: Ludovic Brucker

Researchers at the University of Utah have discovered a new aquifer in the Greenland Ice Sheet that holds liquid water all year long in the otherwise perpetually frozen winter landscape. The aquifer is extensive, covering 27,000 square miles.

The reservoir is known as a “perennial firn aquifer” because water persists within the firn – layers of snow and ice that don’t melt for at least one season. Researchers believe it figures significantly in understanding the contribution of snowmelt and ice melt to rising sea levels.

The study was published online Sunday, 22 December, in the journal Nature Geoscience.

“Of the current sea level rise, the Greenland Ice Sheet is the largest contributor – and it is melting at record levels,” says Rick Forster, lead author and professor of geography at the University of Utah. “So understanding the aquifer’s capacity to store water from year to year is important because it fills a major gap in the overall equation of meltwater runoff and sea levels.”

Forster’s team has been doing research in southeast Greenland since 2010 to measure snowfall accumulation and how it varies from year to year. The area they study covers 14 percent of southeast Greenland yet receives 32 percent of the entire ice sheet’s snowfall, but there has been little data gathered.

In 2010, the team drilled core samples in three locations on the ice for analysis. Team members returned in 2011 to approximately the same area, but at lower elevation. Of the four core samples taken then, two came to the surface with liquid water pouring off the drill while the air temperatures were minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The water was found at about 33 feet below the surface at the first hole and at 82 feet in the second hole.

“This discovery was a surprise,” Forster says. “Although water discharge from streams in winter had been previously reported, and snow temperature data implied small amounts of water, no one had yet reported observing water in the firn that had persisted through the winter.”

The aquifer is extensive, covering 27,000 square miles — larger than the state of West Virginia. It is similar in form to a groundwater aquifer on land that can be used for drinking water. “Here instead of the water being stored in the air space between subsurface rock particles, the water is stored in the air space between the ice particles, like the juice in a snow cone,” Forster adds. “The surprising fact is the juice in this snow cone never freezes, even during the dark Greenland winter. Large amounts of snow fall on the surface late in the summer and quickly insulates the water from the subfreezing air temperatures above, allowing the water to persist all year long.”

Why Studying Ice in Greenland is Important

The Greenland Ice Sheet is vast, covering roughly the same area as the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah combined. The average thickness of the ice is 5,000 feet. In 2012, the ice sheet lost volume of 60 cubic miles – a record for melt and runoff.

The consequences of losing the ice sheet could be catastrophic. If all the water retained in the ice sheet melted, it is estimated that the global sea level would rise about 21 feet, says Forster. Although no one is predicting a total meltoff all at once, keeping an eye on ice formation, runoff amounts and how the water is moving is critical to accurately predicting sea level changes.

Until now, calculations of the ice sheet mass changes did not include a year-round storage mechanism for liquid water. Models predicted that water either flowed into rivers and lakes on the ice surface, into crevasses and subglacial streams that eventually run into the sea, or was refrozen within the ice sheet.

Discovery of the perennial aquifer will help scientists predict the movement and temperature of water within the ice sheet with more precision.

Forster says the reservoir’s exact role is unknown. “It might conserve meltwater flow and thus help slow down the effects of climate change. But it may also have the opposite effect, providing lubrication to moving glaciers and exacerbating ice velocity and calving increasing the mass of ice loss to the global ocean.”

As for whether climate change caused the aquifer to form, Forster says that’s not clear, but simulations of the Greenland Ice Sheet going back to the early 1970s would suggest it has been around for some time.

How the Study was Conducted

The previously unknown storage mode was found in the southeast section of Greenland, where conditions combine to provide sufficient rain and snowmelt to fill the firn with water, as well as high levels of snow accumulation that insulate the water from freezing during the winter.

The team used data collected by airborne and ground-penetrating radar to pinpoint the aquifer, and then took core samples on the ground.

Airborne radar imagery was collected in the area by NASA Operation IceBridge, which is a program directed at collecting images of Earth’s polar ice in unprecedented detail to better understand the processes that connect polar regions with climate change. Ground-penetrating radar and a roving Global Positioning System navigation unit also were towed across the ice in the same area via snowmobile, collecting data every five seconds.

Researchers found that the radar images from air and ground corresponded on both the depth of a bright horizon, indicating where there is a change in consistency of the ice, as well as the undulations of the horizon across distance of about 15 miles. This was confirmation that the airborne radar could map the aquifer just as well as the ground-based radar.

Core samples were taken with a 4-inch-diameter drill. Two segments were extracted that were saturated with liquid water – one from a depth of about 33 feet and another the following day about a mile east and at a depth of more than 80 feet.

Temperatures in the spring of 2011 were below average. Forster notes that, “because air temperatures were minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit during drilling and because surface melting in the area did not begin until June in 2011, there is no doubt that the water found in the firn had persisted through the winter.”

This research is an international collaboration among researchers at the University of Utah, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Byrd Polar Research Center at the Ohio State University, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht, Utrecht University, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas, and the Desert Research Institute at the University of Nevada, Reno. Forster and the Utah team were supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Abstract

Mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet contributes significantly to present sea level rise1. High meltwater runoff is responsible for half of Greenland’s mass loss2. Surface melt has been spreading and intensifying in Greenland, with the highest ever surface area melt and runoff recorded in 20123. However, how surface melt water reaches the ocean, and how fast it does so, is poorly understood. Firn—partially compacted snow from previous years—potentially has the capacity to store significant amounts of melt water in liquid or frozen form4, and thus delay its contribution to sea level. Here we present direct observations from ground and airborne radar, as well as ice cores, of liquid water within firn in the southern Greenland ice sheet. We find a substantial amount of water in this firn aquifer that persists throughout the winter, when snow accumulation and melt rates are high. This represents a previously unknown storage mode for water within the ice sheet. We estimate, using a regional climate model, aquifer area at about 70,000 km2 and the depth to the top of the water table as 5–50 m. The perennial firn aquifer could be important for estimates of ice sheet mass and energy budget.

Citation

“Extensive liquid meltwater storage in firn within the Greenland ice sheet” by

Richard R. Forster, Jason E. Box, Michiel R. van den Broeke, Clément Miège, Evan W. Burgess, Jan H. van Angelen, Jan T. M. Lenaerts, Lora S. Koenig, John Paden, Cameron Lewis, S. Prasad Gogineni, Carl Leuschen & Joseph R. McConnell published by Nature Geoscience. doi:10.1038/ngeo2043

Read the abstract and get the full paper here.

Source

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