earth got used up

In the new movie “Elysium,” Earth is beyond repair, and the rich and powerful have decided to leave it behind.

“The premise is totally believable to me. I spent 28 years working on NASA’s International Space Station and retired last summer as the director of ISS at NASA Headquarters,” Mark Uhran, former director of the International Space Station Division in NASA’s Office of Human Exploration and Operations, said. “When I took a look at the Elysium space station, I thought to myself, that’s certainly achievable in this millennium.” (via Space Station Science: Could Humans Build the ‘Elysium’? | Space.com)

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It took decades for global warming to slowly melt the surface of the Larsen B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, forming nearly 3,000 lakes. But at the end of the Antarctic summer of 2002, all the lakes drained away in the space of a week. And then the 2,700-square-kilometre ice shelf, which was some 220 metres thick and probably had existed for some 12,000 years, rapidly disintegrated into small icebergs, leaving glaciologists scratching their heads.

The researchers showed that if there are many lakes on an ice shelf, the disappearance of one lake could result in fractures under others — an effect that can spread rapidly throughout the ice shelf. “This chain reaction could explain why the lakes drained all together,” MacAyeal said. 

Most of the lakes were about 1,000 metres wide, according to a poster presentation at the same meeting by study co-author Alison Banwell. Once drained, each would leave behind a ring fracture about 4,000 metres wide. When lakes are tightly packed together, as they were on the Larsen B ice shelf, the chain of fracturing would result in thin icebergs calving off, Banwell said.

via Chain reaction shattered huge Antarctica ice shelf : Nature News & Comment

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Other communities across a bone-dry south-west are resorting to extraordinary measures to keep the water flowing. Robert Lee, also in the oil patch, has been hauling in water by tanker. So has Spicewood Beach, a resort town 40 miles from Austin, which has been trucking in water since early 2012.

San Angelo, a city of 100,000, dug a pipeline to an underground water source more than 60 miles away, and sunk half a dozen new wells.

Las Cruces, just across the border from the Texas panhandle in New Mexico, is drilling down 1,000ft in search of water.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/11/texas-tragedy-ample-oil-no-water

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