Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• CNN’s Problems Are Bigger Than Jeff Zucker - How an upcoming merger at WarnerMedia could upend life at the cable news network. - link

• The Sandy Hook Settlement with Remington and the Road Ahead on Gun Violence - Gun manufacturers had considered themselves all but immune, thanks to a 2005 law, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. - link

• The Ukraine Transparency Initiative - The Biden White House is releasing intelligence assessments, reports, and information about Russia’s military moves that in the past would have stayed classified. Is it working? - link

• Everyone Can Be Liz Taylor on Jewelry Instagram - The social-media platform turns out to be the perfect showcase for reinventing old family heirlooms. - link

• How Black Feminists Defined Abortion Rights - As liberation movements bloomed, they offered a vision of reproductive justice that was about equality, not just “choice.” - link

From Vox

• The philosopher King -

  

  An MLK scholar on how we lost sight of King’s nuanced politics — and how we can revive them today.

  Virtually every American knows the basic outline of what Martin Luther King Jr.  did. But very few are familiar with the reasons he did it.

  That’s what Brandon Terry, a professor of African and African American studies at Harvard, believes. In his research, Terry has delved into King’s voluminous public writings to try to understand the thinker behind the activist. What he found was an incredibly sophisticated body of work on racism, class, and democratic politics that goes well beyond what most people know about King. In 2018, Terry and co-author Tommie Shelby convened a group of leading scholars to write a book rescuing King’s political thought from the clutches of sanitized public memory.

  After reading an essay Terry wrote on King in a recent issue of the Boston Review, I decided to call up him to ask about applying King’s ideas to some of the most pressing issues in contemporary American politics. What is King’s theory of racism, and to what extent is it an improvement on the way we talk about it today? How does King address the intersection between race and class? How could a Kingian politics improve on the way we do protest today or deal with the phenomenon of social media shaming?

  What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

  Zack Beauchamp

  King is obviously one of the most famous figures in American public life, but he’s far better known as an activist than a political thinker. His legacy is often portrayed in this kind of anodyne, centrist model — evoked in such a rote way that he can seem almost boring.

  So I’m curious: What motivated you to resuscitate King’s work as a political theorist?

  Brandon Terry

  The main currents in my family are a folk Black radical nationalist tradition and a centrist Black Democratic tradition. I came of political maturity and awareness in the ’90s, in the wake of the full-blown Malcolm X revival. Malcolm X is in every rap song. He’s received a hagiographic treatment in Spike Lee’s [1992] biopic; I read Malcolm X’s autobiography at an early age. In the face of all of that, King seemed like he didn’t really have the answers we were looking for anymore.

  But I started reading his writings for the first time through these amazing professors I had, people like Michael Dawson and Tommie Shelby. And I realized that I didn’t really know anything about him. I had heard packaged clips of “I Have a Dream,” just like every other half-awake American citizen. But I never sat down and just read his enormous amount of work.

  You’ve got Stride Toward Freedom. You’ve got Why We Can’t Wait. You’ve got Where Do We Go From Here? You’ve got Trumpet of Conscience. Not to mention hundreds of speeches and essays. And the more and more I sat with these writings, I just found them utterly compelling in lots of ways — really challenging to some of the assumptions I had about politics, about social theory.

  And I wanted other people to have that experience. It became one of my favorite things to teach as I became a professor, because I could just watch it have the same effect on students that it had on me.

  Zack Beauchamp

  So when you say that being exposed to King’s actual writing had this really transformative effect on you, what do you mean? Or, maybe more precisely, where does King’s thinking improve on the worldviews you grew up with?

  Brandon Terry

  He puts forward an analysis of the multiple sources of Black disadvantage in a way that troubles Black nationalists, [who frame] questions of Black disadvantage as primarily, or almost in their totality, explained by white supremacy. He’s able to put forward ideas about what’s changing about political economy in the 1960s: offshoring, automation, the burgeoning digitization of work, [and the] robotics revolution.

  These things are not driven by white supremacy. They’re driven by efficiency considerations and capitalist enterprise. They’re driven by the need to garner more profit for managerial executives and owners of capital. Because of the history of white supremacy in this country, and because of the current functioning of discrimination, the negative externalities of those developments fall really heavily on the poorest African Americans.

  Jeff Kamen/Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images

  King just had a much richer story about that than I think some of the folk Black nationalist tradition, and that has political implications. If you think something like that is true, it makes the idea of a go-it-alone politics, any politics of narrow separatism or politics that emphasizes cultural rituals, look like dead ends.

  Even worse, it makes them look like really dangerous rhetorical options for people who really aren’t that concerned with ameliorating the plight of the truly disadvantaged — and instead want to carve out spaces of ownership for a small group of Black elites. I think his view right there is just really, really powerful.

  Zack Beauchamp

  You make a related point in your Boston Review essay, where you use King’s thought to criticize the assumption that any kind of racial inequality is explained purely by racism. In contemporary context, that to me reads like a critique of Ibram Kendi’s work — or, at least, the way his work has been deployed as part of what I’d call “pop anti-racism.”

  Am I putting words in your mouth, or is there some real tension here?

  Brandon Terry

  There’s a school of thought out there that sees racial disparity and says, “This disparity is the result, or constitutes in and of itself racism.” Or that the disparity is in and of itself a racial injustice. I don’t exactly know, if cornered, if this is what Kendi would say. But I think for all sorts of reasons, you have to be extremely careful about that.

  One reason is that it presumes that the disparity is negative, right? I once went to an amazing presentation by [Northwestern University sociologist] Mary Pattillo where she flipped disparity discourse on its head. She actually just spent her entire presentation giving examples of disparities in which Black people are on the better end: things like suicide rates, certain self-esteem questions.

  And then there’s a social theory question, which is: What explains the source of the disadvantage? And we have to take seriously the idea that for cultural reasons, for reasons of political economy, for some utterly contingent reasons — everything is not going to be explained by racial animus, racial ideology, the practice of racial domination.

  Let me just give you, again, one political implication of this thing. The sociologist Chris Muller has this amazing new research where he shows that the racial disparity in incarceration is declining but the class disparity is growing, because [the US is] incarcerating more white people who don’t finish high school and fewer college-educated Black people. This is not unraveling the deeper problems [in the American criminal justice system]: structural inequities built into the economy and a culture of punitiveness that flows out of idiosyncratic features of American culture.

  To me, our problems are just simply more complicated. That’s bad because it makes it harder to get a handle on them at the level of social theory, but it’s good politically because it at least leaves open the question of there being a bigger coalition to fix these things.

  Zack Beauchamp

  So if simple disparity isn’t the right way to think about racism, what’s the Kingian alternative?

  Brandon Terry

  King, I think, is trying to get at a couple of things [in his theory of racism]. One is that there are psychological elements — a practice of reasoning that entails certain forms of irrationality.

  An [example] is expecting there to be a Black desire for revenge and retaliation at every turn. To me, that’s one of the hallmarks of American racism. You see it in Thomas Jefferson, you see it in Tocqueville’s description of why he thinks the presence of the Negro race is the biggest threat to the persistence of American democracy. You see it in the “rising tide of color against the white world” hysterics that opened up the 20th century that were parodied in The Great Gatsby. You see it in the fear and panic over Black Power. You see it in Glenn Beck frantically writing on the chalkboard that the Affordable Care Act is really a secret reparations plan hatched by Barack Obama.

  The idea is that if they get power, they’ll do to us what we’ve done to them, right? It’s this paranoid reasoning that I think is pretty central. It’s one of many psychological pathologies that are attached to racial reasoning.

  The second piece is these cognitive and empathetic failures. Part of what is wrong about racism is that it’s false as a mode of cognitive reasoning and as a moral reasoning: You have these failures to respond to the suffering you see around you. Think of cases like Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and George Floyd. The callousness in some people’s response to those deaths reflects not just malice — it’s a deep failure to see what’s lost when a life like that is extinguished.

  Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images

  King would sometimes talk about racism as this theory of only one group being able to contribute to the progress of the world; that’s what he’s getting at. Trayvon Martin had something profound to contribute to the world — his life should be mourned. When we don’t respond that way to that life being extinguished, just because of the skin it’s wrapped in, that strikes me as a constitutive element of racism.

  Sometimes education policy people will make these sorts of arguments where they say, “Because we’ve underinvested in Black and Brown communities, we’re losing trillions in economic productivity.” And there’s a reason those arguments are totally ineffective: The people that they’re meant to persuade don’t believe that reservoir of possibility exists in those communities.

  And then the last piece, for King, is the idea that [racial inequities are embodied] in practices and habits that get rooted in policies, laws, habits, and institutions. They congeal over time to be real features of our sociopolitical world.

King says that you really can’t understand what we’re up against if you don’t take seriously the idea that this is a congenital problem in America: that these practices, that these ideas have dug their heels deep into our structural arrangements.

Zack Beauchamp

So let’s take this theory and apply it to the present day. How would a Kingian antiracist politics think through and address our very different contemporary set of social problems?

Brandon Terry

Part of the trouble with thinking with Martin Luther King Jr. is that he’s become so iconic, and the civil rights movement has become so iconic, that we forget that their arguments, that their forms of demonstration, that their practices are answers to questions, particular questions they were trying to ask.

King’s philosophy is born of struggle. And these ideas, his attempts to theorize the social world, come out of experiments in politics. He’s got a view that part of what protest is about is trying to throw the reflexes and habits of a politics of domination off balance, so that people might hear the other’s arguments better and really respond to them.

The metaphor he often used was “moral jiujitsu.” In jiujitsu, you use the force of the opponent’s attack against them, redirecting the force to do something surprising. And King’s always trying to think like that.

In his time, he thought the greatest stereotype against Black people that’s being used to diminish our equal standing is the idea that we are passive recipients of all manner of abuse who don’t value our own standing. That we will tolerate any infringement upon our person and be humiliated ad nauseam.

If that’s the stereotype regime in which you inhabit, then the kinds of protests that they developed are just remarkable aesthetic and political responses to that set of presumptions. Who could hold that view after witnessing what the civil rights movement’s classical phase sought to demonstrate?

They were so successful in their challenge to that regime of stereotype that you and I live under the exact opposite regime — which is that Black people are now seen as hypersensitive, so utterly obsessed with any slight, that they will fly off the handle and protest at a moment’s notice. We are the protest people in people’s imagination.

Part of the task of our intellectuals, and part of the task of our activists, is to recover [King’s] questions. So instead of saying, “We know what a protest looks like, because we’ve seen it on Black History Month footage,” we need to say, “They were protesting in a way meant to disarm fear. What are the fears of our moment, and how might we disarm them?”

When we talk about voter suppression, King thought the vote was a matter of dignity. Are our protests about voter suppression appropriately conveying that this is a matter of dignity, not of partisan politics?

So recovering the questions is really, really important.

• Russia orders troops into eastern Ukraine, raising threat of larger invasion -

  

  President Vladimir Putin declared two regions in the Donbas region independent, then ordered in troops.

  Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered troops into two Ukrainian regions held by Russian-backed separatists, a dramatic escalation that threatens to spiral out into a larger conflict.

  Putin had amassed some 190,000 troops near the Ukrainian border and appeared to be making preparations for war. His decision Monday violates principles of international law, but isn’t yet being treated by the West as an invasion that the US promised would trigger a “massive” package of sanctions.

  The question now is whether this is a preface to a much larger invasion of Ukraine.

  Though Russia hasn’t yet staged the large-scale land invasion that the Biden administration has been publicly warning about for several days, a dizzying series of developments over the weekend showed how the window for a diplomatic outcome has narrowed. After days of fabricated claims of Ukrainian aggression, on Monday Putin delivered a combative, hour-long speech on Ukraine, which essentially denied Ukrainian statehood and portrayed NATO as a direct threat to Russia.

  Christina Animashaun/Vox

In his speech, Putin recognized as independent the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic, two territories in eastern Ukraine where he has backed separatists since 2014. “Otherwise, all responsibility for the possible continuation of the bloodshed will be entirely on the conscience of the regime ruling on the territory of Ukraine,” Putin said. “Announcing the decisions taken today, I am confident in the support of the citizens of Russia. Of all the patriotic forces of the country.”

Soon after, Putin announced the deployment of troops for “peacekeeping operations.”

Most experts Vox spoke to said this looks like the beginning, not the end, of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, although it is impossible to predict events with certainty. Russia’s declaration of independence for the breakaway territories, and the move of peacekeeping forces into that territory, “sets the stage for the next steps,” said Michael Kofman, research director in the Russia studies program at CNA, a research organization in Arlington, Virginia.

“In Russia, [it] provides the political-legal basis for the formal introduction of Russian forces, which they’ve already decided to do,” he said. “Secondarily, it provides the legal local basis for Russian use force in defense of these independent Republic’s Russians citizens there. It’s basically political theater.”

What Russia does from here on out is likely to determine how the United States and its NATO allies respond to Russia’s actions. The White House has promised severe sanctions for a Russian invasion, but so far the US and European allies have just sanctioned the two breakaway regions.

Russia has tens of thousands troops along different parts of the border with Ukraine. It is a force capable, and in position, for a much larger-scale operation. “Russia did not need to amass 190,000 troops in order to just recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk,” said Natia Seskuria, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

Is this the invasion the world has been watching for?

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine, backing pro-Kremlin separatists in the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk in a conflict that has simmered for years and killed at least 14,000.

Shelling from the Russian-backed separatist side of the border intensified in recent days, with separatist leaders blaming Kyiv — without evidence — for the fighting, and calling on its residents to evacuate. By Monday, Putin had called a meeting with his security council to discuss the situation, then hours later declared these breakaway regions independent, sending in forces for what he described as a “peacekeeping” mission.

Valentin Sprinchak/TASS via Getty Images

Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, described this as an invasion. But she also said that it was likely a distraction — laying a foundation for more steps to come. Rep. Liz Cheney tweeted, “Russia has invaded Ukraine,” and Michael McFaul, who served as Obama’s ambassador to Russia, said the same.

Kofman, of CNA, described it as a “renewed invasion,” building on what happened in 2014 and 2015. Analyst Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft wrote, “This would fall far short of invasion. It would mark only a limited escalation in the conflict that has been going on in the Donbas since 2014.”

It’s unclear if this escalation will lead to Russian troops directly engaging Ukrainian ones, or what will happen on the ground in these declared independent regions in the coming days.

But this distinction of what is and isn’t an invasion matters, as it will direct how the United States and its allies will respond. On Monday evening, the White House issued an executive order with sanctions against those doing business in the breakaway republics. But the US has yet to call recent developments an “invasion,” and in summaries of President Joe Biden’s calls with European leaders, the White House described the events as an “ongoing escalation along the borders of Ukraine” and a “clear attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

A White House official told reporters that while the administration did not yet rule out more severe sanctions, it will “assess what Russia does and not focus on what Russia says.”

How did it come to this?

The world has been closely watching Russia’s troop movements on the Ukrainian front since November. Late last year, Moscow issued the United States a series of demands. They included some big asks, including a guarantee against Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership and a commitment for NATO to roll back some of its troop deployment in countries recently admitted to the alliance. These were nonstarters for the US and its allies, as they would effectively give Russia veto power over the alliance’s decisions — and over European security.

Still, diplomatic efforts followed, with the US and Russia negotiating for most of January, and European and US leaders cycling through Ukraine and Moscow. Even as these efforts took place, Russia’s mass mobilization of soldiers around Ukraine in recent weeks has signaled Putin’s interest in maintaining the option of a full-fledged land war in Europe.

The reasons for this conflict are complex, rooted in post–Cold War history and Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, and raise larger questions about the place of the US and Russia in the 21st century.

NATO’s eastward expansion to former Soviet republics on the Russian border since the Cold War ended hasn’t helped. Biden’s CIA director, William Burns, who served as ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008, had predicted that giving Ukraine NATO membership would “create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” (Ukraine isn’t part of NATO and was not expected to join anytime soon, but the country has deepened cooperation with the West since 2014).

Alexey Nikolsky/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images

But Putin has dismissed Ukrainian sovereignty entirely. In Monday’s speech and in a July 2021 essay, he claimed Ukraine is part of a “unified state” with Russia. The decision to move troops in doesn’t mean Russia is officially annexing Donetsk and Luhansk — yet — but it does escalate efforts to pull the country back into Moscow’s orbit.

Previously, Russia’s plan had been to pressure Ukraine to adopt the 2015 Minsk Agreement that would allow Ukraine to regain formal control over the Donbas rebel-held areas in return for granting their proxies an outsize role over decision-making in the capital of Kyiv, said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.

Putin’s actions on Monday signaled a new direction. “Today, [Russia] declared the Minsk agreements dead completely, which means that the era of Russia trying to achieve its objectives through a negotiated return of the Donbas is over,” Charap said. “It means they’re about to get to establish their influence through the use of force.”

What happens next?

Putin is likely one of the only people who knows what comes next. But the diplomatic pathways out of this conflict are closing rapidly, and experts say that Putin looks to be building a pretext he may need to carry out a more robust attack on Ukraine — possibly going so far as threatening the capital of Kyiv. This is the worst-case scenario that the White House has warned about: a war that would cost tens of thousands of lives and potentially spur a mass refugee crisis.

Putin’s escalation in eastern Ukraine occurred the day after French President Emmanuel Macron spoke with the Russian leader for hours, which seemed to point to a possible diplomatic out — specifically, an agreement “in principle” for a summit between Presidents Biden and Putin, after Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov were scheduled to meet Thursday. Russia’s latest actions almost certainly have jeopardized any sort of high-level summit, said Rajan Menon, director of the Grand Strategy program at Defense Priorities.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an address Monday that Putin’s incursion was a violation of the country’s “national integrity and sovereignty.”

“We are on our land, we are not afraid of anything and anyone, we don’t owe anything to anyone, and we will not give away anything to anyone. And we are confident of this,” Zelensky said.

Ukraine, though, doesn’t have many options. The Ukrainian army, if it returns fire, risks giving Russia the exact pretext it would need to attack. And experts noted that Russia is already trying hard to manufacture the evidence for that pretext, with or without Ukrainian involvement.

That all feeds into Putin’s recent moves, and what he might do next. Putin’s formal recognition of the independence of the two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine created a justification for a formal military presence in the area. Moscow has been circulating fake videos on Russian state media of alleged Ukrainian attacks. Even if some of these videos are poorly produced, US intelligence officials and experts have repeatedly suggested Russia might attempt to manufacture a “false flag” attack as a provocation to justify more robust military force.

“By recognizing the independence of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, Donetsk and Luhansk, the Kremlin has laid the foundations for its ambition to achieve main goals of the regime change and erasing the Ukrainian sovereignty, hence the return of Ukraine into Russia’s sphere of influence,” Seskuria, of RUSI, said.

That hasn’t happened yet. But the question is what — if anything — could move Putin from a course toward a takeover.

As Biden himself noted in 2018 while speaking about Russia at the Council on Foreign Relations, “My dad had an expression, ‘Never back a man in a corner whose only way out is over top of you.’ Well, you know, take a look at Russia now. Where do they go?”

• The hidden melting of the most important ice on Earth, explained -

  

  The future of sea level rise is being written underneath Antarctica and Greenland.

  
  
  
  

  The largest ice masses on the planet contain so much water that they’re increasing sea levels around the globe as temperatures rise. Satellites can see these drastic changes from space.

  But new research finds that some of the most profound changes to Earth’s ice are largely invisible because they’re happening far beneath the surface. Land ice and ice shelves are wearing thin from below, and it’s happening much faster than previously expected.

  Ice is at once extremely simple and extraordinarily complicated. It’s just frozen water. But as it gathers in miles-thick sheets near the planet’s poles, it becomes a geological force that can move mountains and reshape the contours of the planet.

  The sheer weight of ice presses down on the land and carves it over millennia as the ice slides. Ice holds more than three-quarters of the world’s fresh water.

  And when it melts, it can threaten the lives and livelihoods of billions of people. More than one-third of humanity lives within 60 miles (100 kilometers) of a coastline. As average temperatures continue to rise, so will the oceans.

  Warmer temperatures are melting solid ice into liquid water that flows into the seas. The oceans themselves are heating up, too, causing the water to expand. Together, these factors are pushing water levels ever higher. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported recently that the next 30 years could cause seas to rise in the coastal United States as much as they did in the past century — about 10 to 12 inches (25 to 30 cm).

  “By 2050, moderate flooding ⁠— which is typically disruptive and damaging by today’s weather, sea level and infrastructure standards ⁠— is expected to occur more than 10 times as often as it does today,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, NOAA national ocean service director, in a press release. “These numbers mean a change from a single event every 2-5 years to multiple events each year, in some places.”

  Despite the enormous consequences of melting polar ice, there’s a lot scientists still don’t know — including some of the mechanisms behind it, where tipping points may lie, and its ripple effects over the whole planet. But recent studies are bringing one of the most difficult-to- study regions into sharper focus: what scientists can’t see with their own eyes. Their findings could change how much the oceans are expected to rise in the coming decades.

  What’s hiding beneath the ice

  There are two main kinds of ice that shape sea levels. The first is sea ice, which comes from ocean water that freezes solid. It makes up most of the ice at the North Pole. As it forms, it changes the saltiness of seawater and helps shape powerful ocean currents.

  Melting sea ice doesn’t change the overall amount of water in the ocean, just as melting ice cubes don’t change the water level in a glass of water. But sea ice tends to reflect sunlight, while the darker ocean tends to soak up its heat. That speeds up warming and drives more ice melt in a worrying feedback loop. The warmer temperatures also contribute to the thermal expansion of water, which in turn can raise sea levels.

  The second kind of ice is land ice, which builds up in sheets over thousands of years from compacted snow. In Antarctica, the ice sheet is 1.5 miles thick (2.4 km) on average, reaching up to 3 miles (5 km) in some areas. Greenland’s ice sheet averages a mile in thickness. When land ice starts to jut out over the ocean, it creates a floating ice shelf.

  Most of the world’s ice shelves are in Antarctica, where they span more than a million square kilometers, or 386,000 square miles. They act as a buttress, slowing down glaciers that would otherwise flow more quickly into the ocean. But as they get thinner or break apart, the glaciers flow into the ocean at a faster rate, raising sea levels.

  Ice loss has accelerated in Antarctica in recent years. Every 40 hours, Antarctica loses a billion metric tons of ice, according to a 2018 study, and at least half that loss comes from ice shelves.

  Many of these staggering losses are occurring in places that are very hard to monitor. “It’s a hidden world,” said Robert Larter, a geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey. “We can see from satellites that the ice is thinning quite dramatically in certain areas, but it’s happening from the bottom up rather than the surface down.”

  Scientists are finding innovative new ways to deepen their understanding of these crucial ice shelves, Larter wrote in a recent commentary in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The key is measuring the melting that happens below rather than above, a phenomenon called basal melting.

  The chilly air above the South Pole tends to keep ice frozen from above and around its edges. But deep Antarctic waters aren’t quite as frigid. “At depth in the Southern Ocean, there is a tremendous amount of heat energy below a few hundred meters down,” said Larter. This warmer water can then come into contact with the underside of ice shelves, causing them to melt.

  “Warm” by Antarctic standards means “barely above freezing,” but it’s enough to thin ice shelves. “That is in fact what is the driver of most of the serious ice loss that’s happening in Antarctica at the moment,” Larter said.

  Marlo Garnsworthy/Geophysical Research Letters

  Some of the most intense basal melting is happening at the ice shelves around the Thwaites Glacier and the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica. For 60 years, the ice front around the Pine Island Glacier stood in place, but between 2015 and 2020, its northern region suddenly retreated more than 30 kilometers. It’s an example of how changes in ice aren’t always slow and steady but can be sudden.

  Scientists are probing the melting depths of ice shelves in several ways. They are drilling holes through ice shelves and lowering instruments and robots down below, for example.

But researchers have also found that melting beneath ice shelves can leave telltale signs above. Ice shelves tend to have a smooth surface, but they get rougher as they melt from below, according to a study in Geophysical Research Letters last year. Measuring surface roughness of ice shelves could become an easy way to gauge how much basal melting is occurring far below. The roughness could be an early warning sign of destabilizing fractures in the ice that could lead to a collapse.

Climate change is squeezing Greenland’s ice sheet from above and below

Greenland is home to the second-largest ice sheet on Earth, accounting for 8 percent of the world’s ice, and it too is melting ever faster. But Greenland’s ice loss is different from Antarctica’s in crucial ways.

One is that almost all of Greenland’s ice is on land, with few sections floating on water. The air over Greenland is also warmer, so melting at the surface of the ice sheet is a much more significant driver of ice loss than at the South Pole. In fact, during the summer, thousands of meltwater lakes and streams form on the surface of the ice sheet.

“The ice sheet is melting fast on the surface, and that’s something we don’t see in Antarctica,” said Poul Christoffersen, a glaciologist at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.

The water doesn’t stay on top. It pours through cracks and fissures in the ice, falling more than a mile in some places to the rocky ground below. In a study this week published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Christoffersen and his colleagues revealed that this is melting Greenland’s ice sheet from below.

Like the water that rushes through a hydroelectric dam, falling meltwater carries an immense amount of kinetic energy. That energy causes water to warm as it pools beneath the ice sheet. This in turn triggers basal melting. “The melt rates are actually astounding,” said Christoffersen. He estimated peak basal melt rates on the Greenland ice sheet to be 100 times greater than previous estimates that didn’t include this heat source.

The water sandwiched between the ground and the ice sheet also acts as a lubricant, allowing the ice sheet to slide more easily toward the ocean. But because this water is hidden from view, researchers only have a spotty picture of what’s going on. “We don’t really know a lot about these systems,” Christoffersen said. “Are they large rivers or a myriad of small streams, or even tiny films?”

Researchers estimated that these factors would increase the overall melt rate of Greenland by 8 percent. “It doesn’t sound like much, but anybody [who] has ever had a mortgage at 8 percent, they know it’s pretty painful,” Christoffersen said. That means over the coming years, Greenland’s contributions to sea level rise around the world may be greater than previously thought.

There are still more mysteries locked in the ice

These latest findings further confirm that Earth’s cryosphere — its frozen regions — is in trouble. There are forces at work that scientists are only now starting to appreciate.

A better understanding of melting ice helps us imagine the future and prepare for what’s coming. It could help people decide whether to adapt to rising seas, for example with sea walls and elevating buildings, or retreat from coastal areas altogether. But researchers caution that there’s a lot left to study, and the ice could cross a threshold of no return.

For instance, the thinning ice shelves in West Antarctica could enter a cycle of collapse. They could lose enough mass that they fall apart, and the glaciers they keep on land would flow into the ocean much faster.

“There are theoretical scenarios where it could run away,” Larter said. “Once it starts, it would be very difficult to stop.” These potential tipping points are some of the biggest uncertainties for predicting sea level rise, particularly after 2050.

The other major uncertainty — and potential source of hope — is what humans will do about climate change. Confronted with the ice already lost and the growing threats of rising seas, people could start cutting greenhouse gas emissions drastically enough to stave off some of the worst possibilities for sea level rise.

Or countries could continue on the path toward disaster, allowing the planet to heat up further. For billions of people around the world, the future is on thin ice.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Indian Cricketers’ Association strongly condemns ‘threat’ to Wriddhiman Saha - ICA head Ashok Malhotra wants the Indian wicketkeeper to reveal the name of the ‘journalist’ who sent him the message

• NZ vs Ind women’s ODI | Richa Ghosh shines but India slip to fourth straight defeat - The game became a glorified ‘T20’ due to rain as Amelia Kerr stole the show with a 33-ball-68 which took New Zealand to 191 for 5

• An all-Malayali cricket team to play second division league in Ottawa - Ottawa Tuskers will be the lone all-Malayali outfit among the 13 teams to participate in the league

• Explained | What is WADA and CAS? - The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is responsible for ensuring adherence to the World Anti-Doping Code (WADC) globally.

• Explained | What is an IOC Session - Mumbai became the second Indian city to host an International Olympic Committee (IOC) session. New Delhi had last hosted the session in 1983.

From The Hindu: National News

• Nelliyampathy farm’s biodiversity registry soon -

• First DMK Mayor for Dindigul Corporation -

• Harish Rao helps girl to pursue nursing course - Minister supports her education by paying the required fee

• Vypeen-Munambam highway turns a virtual alley of death -

• Finally, roads to wear a new look in Vizianagaram district - Govt. releases funds for development of several key routes

From BBC: Europe

• Ukraine crisis: Russia orders troops into rebel-held regions - Moscow’s move to recognise two separatist regions and send in soldiers has drawn wide condemnation.

• Putin’s angry speech rewriting Ukraine’s history - In an hour-long televised speech, the Russian leader made accusations, grievances and challenges.

• Lufthansa and Swiss Air Lines to suspend flights to Ukraine capital - The airlines suspend services to Ukraine’s capital as fears grow over a possible Russian invasion.

• Ferry fire: Missing Euroferry Olympia passenger found alive off Corfu - But hours later rescuers find a body in a burnt-out lorry in the ferry burning off Greece.

• The Queen tests positive for Covid - She has mild symptoms and expects to continue “light duties” at Windsor, Buckingham Palace says.

From Ars Technica

• Ivermectin fails another COVID trial as study links use to GOP politics - “Political affiliation should not be a factor in clinical treatment decisions.” - link

• In a strategic shift, Roku plans to make its own TV sets - Two sources say Roku is exploring the idea seriously. - link

• IRS says you can now create account without submitting to facial recognition - IRS still uses ID.me but says users can choose interview instead of a selfie scan. - link

• Study finds 90 percent of medieval chivalric and heroic manuscripts have been lost - Researchers used ecological “unseen species” model to estimate size of medieval European lit. - link

• Members of our species were in Western Europe around 54,000 years ago - At least one child left behind a baby tooth to prove it. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• The FBI, the CIA, and the KGB are all trying to prove they are the best at catching criminals. The Secretary General of the UN decides to set them a test. He releases a rabbit into a forest, and each of them has to catch it. -

  The FBI receive 1000 tips about the rabbit’s location but refuses to investigate.

  The CIA burns down the whole forest and said there’s no rabbit.

  The KGB drags a man out of the forest and beats him as he screams “OK I’m a rabbit!”

  submitted by /u/Svenray
  [link] [comments]

• A woman pregnant with triplets gets shot three times in her stomach -

  Miraculously, she and all three baby’s survive.

  One of her daughters runs into her room one day and says “mommy mommy! I was going to the toilet and a bullet came out!” The mother sighed and told her the story of how she got shot and survived.

  In came her other daughter “mommy mommy! I was going to the toilet and a bullet came out!” The mother sighed again and told her the story as well

  In ran her son, “mommy mommy!” The mother cut him off “let me guess, you went to the toilet and a bullet came out?” She then explained the story to him. “No mommy!” He said “I was whacking off and I shot the dog!”

  submitted by /u/Eren_2021
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• A creationist told me that evolution must be wrong because it violates the second law of thermodynamics -

  His claim was that in order for simple organisms like bacteria to evolve into much more complex life like fish and mice and horses and gorillas and people, an enormous input of energy would be required, therefore it must be impossible.

  I stayed up all night trying to think of something that would refute his claim, and then it dawned on me.

  submitted by /u/Duncan____Idaho
  [link] [comments]

• [NSFW] A couple made a deal that whoever died first would come back and inform the other if there was sex after death. -

  After a long life together , the wife was the first to die and true to her words, she made first contact.

  W: “Darling. Darling.”

  H: “Is that you my love?”

  W: “Yes , I’ve come back like we agreed”

  H : “That’s wonderful! What is it like in the afterlife? Is there sex?”

  W: “Well, as soon as I get up in the morning, I have sex. After sex and breakfast it’s off to the these green pastures with an amazing crystal lake. Thereafter I bathe in the warm sun and have sex a couple more times. Then I have lunch, you’d be proud - lots of greens. After lunch, it’s back to the pastures again. Then it’s more sex until late at night. I catch some much needed sleep and then the next day it starts all over again.”

  H

  “Oh wow! Are you in Heaven?”

  W: “No, I’m a goat somewhere in the Middle East”

  submitted by /u/earthymalt
  [link] [comments]
• A policeman sees a little girl riding her bike… -

  A policeman sees a little girl riding her bike and says, “Did Santa get you that?”
  “Yes,” replies the little girl.
  “Well,” says the policeman, “tell Santa to put a reflector light on it next year,” and fines her $5.
  The girl looks up at the policeman and says, “Nice horse you’ve got there, did Santa bring you that?” The policeman chuckles and replies, “He sure did!”
  “Well,” says the little girl, “next year, tell Santa the ass goes on the back of the horse and not on top of it.”

  submitted by /u/l3sly
  [link] [comments]