Messing with gravity

There are things you'd like to count on, and gravity is one of them, yes, even when you're at the top of a ladder.  Here's the thing. Ice has mass; it's heavy because it's water, which is pretty heavy, just ice is just a tad less dense than water, which is one of the few substances whose solid form is less dense than it's liquid phase. Now what is happening is that a lot of ice is melting in Antarctica, so much that the loss of this mass is ever so slightly altering gravity; it's a tiny bit less down there now. When you start messing with gravity, people should start paying attention. Just think how much ice has to melt to affect gravity! It's that darned old global warming to blame. Oh yes, and the water that was ice, what about that?  Well, goodbye Florida, goodbye Louisiana. Will their governors go down with their states denying all the way? Sure.   

Botany in Antarctica

What do botantists study in Antarctica? Well, plants, of course, but they don't grow there now. Here and there rocky islands emerge above the ice cap and their fossil bearing sediments thus exposed bespeak a very different climate in a very different time. In the Late Permian Antarctica was part of Gondwana, a super continent, and as an ice age receded pteridosperms , woody, seed plants with ferny foliage, moved in, and a group called the glossopterids were the most common. Their fossils provide a window on an ancient world, and somewhere, somehow, some of the pteridosperms had a common ancestry with flowering plants. Still this tropical botanist find the idea of Antarctic field work rather daunting. Besides my best field parka is at the cleaners.