(...)
"The 13th edition of the Times Atlas was published today (it will be available on October 1st here in the U.S.), and aside from all the geopolitical changes (South Sudan is now an independent nation state, for instance), it's the the geophysical changes – many due to climate change – that I find most fascinating.
"We’re having to revise coastlines, remap ice shelves, and change lakes that are shrinking in size on maps,” says Jethro Lennox, a senior editor of the Times Atlas.
The Greenland ice cap is significantly smaller than it was in the 2007 edition, yielding a much "greener" Greenland in the new version. Cartographers erased roughly 15 percent of the ice shelf that was once thought to be permanent. Off the east coast of Greenland, a new island exposed by a retreating glacier and fittingly named "Warming Island" (or Uunartoq Qeqertoq in Greenlandic) was deemed large and permanent enough by the map's editors to be drawn and named for the first time.
"The great seas of the Middle East and Central Asia – including the Aral Sea and the Dead Sea – have new, tighter coastlines as the water bodies shrink. The breakup of the Larsen B and Wilkins ice shelves in Antarctica are portrayed, along with the "ice bridge" that once joined Charcot Island to the continent's mainland...."
(((Does Greenland sound remote to you? Not here in the incipient "Great Texas Desert.")))
http://www.onearth.org/blog/texas-global-warming-drought-wildfires
(((See that big red ball off in the middle of climatic nowhere? I'm sitting in it.)))
