Wednesday, 31 July 2013

Exposing banking fraud

KIRI CAMPBELL Of Hawera New Zealand Unlawfully Arrested And Detained After Exposing Massive Banking Fraud


29 July, 2013

UPDATE: COURTHOUSE SHUT DOWN BY PROTESTERS http://www.openureyes.org.nz/blog/?q=node/4661

KIRI CAMPBELL: Kangaroo Court In Hawera New Zealand: http://www.openureyes.org.nz/blog/?q=node/4657

EDUCATE YOURSELF ABOUT MONEY CREATION: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDtBSiI13fE

Kiri Campbell of Hawera NZ has been detained by the NZ Police and NZ Courts for exercising her rights. She is the only Maori Woman in the world to make a stand against the alleged foreclosed banks and corporations by using THEIR OWN FRAUDULENT INSTRUMENTS to bring the system to its knees for ‘The One People’ of Aotearoa and the World.

She used the Mary Croft information to deposit 15,000,000.00 of her own value into a bank account as a way to reveal the fraud of the current banking and monetary system.

Others have used closed bank accounts to dissolve 'debt' and 'pay' off 'debt' but this is the first time a deposit using UCC filing has been done in this way. A summary of the process used by Kiri to do this has been posted at this website here:http://briankellysblog.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/kiris-deposits-15000000-o...
SEE ALSO: http://www.scribd.com/doc/154780181/Kiri-from-New-Zealand-Deposited-15-M... .


After successfully drawing down the value from The Taranaki Savings Bank into her own account Kiri was charged with Fraud and Attempting to Obtain Pecuniary Advantage. During her incarceration she was coerced into signing release forms of some type which she did under duress and stated as much on the form itself. Kiri was also telling the public servants she encountered that her consent was NOT given for the proceedings at every stage of her interaction.


The “authorities” are claiming fraud and dishonestly, yet Kiri made Notice of her intent at every stage. The courts will, during discovery, be forced to put all of that public evidence into the hearing which is going to detail all of the foreclosure flyer information and more importantly their violation of the 3 day right to rescind on contracts; provided under Contract Law and the UCC. The bank violated this right when they froze her accounts within 24 hours of the transaction being made.
the basis for charging Kiri with fraud is because she was using an instrument of fraud: a check from a closed bank account. Yet our signatures on Negotiable Instruments are "monetized" all the time; The Deceptive Acts and Practices of the System are revealed by these actions. 


To deny this Declaration Of Value by Kiri is to deny every loan made for the past 50 years and more. This is a very big mistake, and as always the universe provides players to play their part. In this case the former TSB Bank had offered their hand. 


This is a call to help get her released from Custody and the Hawera Court this coming Tuesday. We are asking ‘The One People’ across the world to support with Courtesy Notices, Invoices, Prayer and BE PRESENT in the courthouse if you can on TUESDAY 30th JULY 2013 9am @ HAWERA COURT HOUSE New Zealand.





KIRI NEEDS YOUR HELP!

1. If you believe that you can help KIRI CAMPBELL on this day, we need to load the courthouse with supporters of OPPT delivering Foreclosure Flyers, or

2. Send COURTESY NOTICES to recipients listed on http://briankellysblog.blogspot.com.au/

3. Those that have sent courtesy notices to back them with invoices or

4. Be present at the Hawera Court House on Tuesday 9am or

5. Pray at 9am Tuesday (New Zealand time) for Kiri if you can’t be physically present or

6. Make this viral across the internet.

MORE WAYS TO HELP: 

Facebook: The One People (OPPT) Aotearoa-New Zealand 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/144235099093079/
Facebook: Exodus - Movement of da people Project XIII

https://www.facebook.com/groups/OPPTAUS/
Facebook: The One People Australia

https://www.facebook.com/groups/TopAustralia/
Facebook: Claim your sovereign right Australia/Aotearoa
More documents provided by Kiri are available to view at this link: 

You can listen to an interview with Kiri from the 19th of July 2013 below.


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Evading responsiity

Key, the slimy bastard!

Key won't take responsibility for phone records


The Prime Minister John Key is refusing to accept responsibility for a journalist's phone records being given to Kitteridge inquiry and he says the Parliamentary Service was not ordered to release them.


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Discussing the methane threat

Arctic methane catastrophe scenario is based on new empirical observations
Critics of new Nature paper on costs of Arctic warming ignore latest science on permafrost methane at everyone's peril

Nafeez Ahmed


31 July, 2013


Last week, the journal Nature published a new paper warning of a $60 trillion price tag for a potential 50 Gigatonne methane pulse from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) over 10-50 years this century. The paper, however, prompted many to suggest that its core scenario - as Arctic permafrost thaws it could increasingly unleash dangerous quantities of methane from sub-ice methane hydrates in as quick as a decade - is implausible.

The Washington Post's Jason Samenow argued that "most everything known and published about methane indicates this scenario is very unlikely." Andrew Revkin of the New York Times (NYT) liberally quoted Samenow among others on "the lack of evidence that such an outburst is plausible." Similarly, Carbon Brief concluded: "The scientists we spoke to suggested the authors have chosen a scenario that's either implausible, or very much at the upper limit of what we can reasonably expect."
Both the Post and NYT quoted Prof David Archer, an expert on ocean sediments and methane at the University of Chicago:
"For methane to be a game-changer in the future of Earth's climate, it would have to degas to the atmosphere catastrophically, on a time scale that is faster than the decadal lifetime of methane in the air. So far no one has seen or proposed a mechanism to make that happen."
Dr Vincent Gauci, a methane expert at Open University, similarly argued:
"It's not a given all the methane will end up in the atmosphere. Some could be oxidised [broken down] in the water by bacteria, and some could remain in the sediments on the seafloor."
The problem is that these reservations are based on outdated assumptions that sea floor released methane would not make it into the atmosphere - but all the new fieldwork on the levels of methane being released above the ESAS shows this assumption is just empirically wrong.
Atmospheric methane levels in the Arctic are currently at new record highs, averaging about 1900 parts per billion, 70 parts per billion higher than the global average. NASA researchers have found local methane plumes as large as 150 kilometres across - far higher than previously anticipated.
Dr Gavin Schmidt, climate modeller at NASA, was also cited claiming lack of evidence from ice cores of previous catastrophic methane pulses in the Earth's history in the Early Holocene or Eamian, when Arctic temperatures were warmer than today. But the blanket references to the past may well be irrelevant. In the Early Holocene, the ESAS was not an underwater shelf but a frozen landmass, illustrating the pointlessness of this past analogy with contemporary conditions.
Dr Schmidt also overlooked other issues - such as new research showing that the warm, Eamian interglacial period some 130,000 years ago should not be used as a model for today's climate due to fundamental differences in the development of the Arctic ocean. Ice core methane records are also too short to reach back to the entire Cenozoic - another reason suggesting lack of past evidence is no basis for present complacency; and even Prof Archer himself recognises that ice cores will not necessarily capture a past catastrophic methane release due to fern diffusion.
Finally, the Post and NYT refer to a range of scientific publications - a 2008 report by the US Climate Change Science Programme and a 2011 review of the literature by Carolyn Rupple also in the journal Nature - essentially arguing that a catastrophic methane release would be, for all intents and purposes, impossible within such a short time-frame, with actual methane releases taking place over hundreds if not thousands of years.
Yet in my interview with Prof Peter Wadhams, co-author of the Nature study and head of Polar ocean physics at Cambridge University, he told me that the scientists who rejected his scenario as implausible were simply unacquainted with the unique dynamics of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, the nature of permafrost melting there, and its relationship to ongoing releases of methane in recent years which have been wholly unexpected within established models based on reconstructions of Earth's historical climate:
"Those who understand Arctic seabed geology and the oceanography of water column warming from ice retreat do not say that this is a low probability event. I think one should trust those who know about a subject rather than those who don't. As far as I'm concerned, the experts in this area are the people who have been actively working on the seabed conditions in the East Siberian Sea in summer during the past few summers where the ice cover has disappeared and the water has warmed. The rapid disappearance of offshore permafrost through water heating is a unique phenomenon, so clearly no 'expert' would have found a mechanism elsewhere to compare with this... I think that most Arctic specialists would agree that this scenario is plausible."
In a rebuttal to the original Post article, Wadhams points out that none of the scientists rejecting his scenario understand the unique mechanism currently at play in the Arctic, and all were citing research preceding the empirical evidence which unearthed this mechanism - which has only become clear in recent years in the context of the rapid loss of summer sea ice.
While Wadhams refers directly to an actual empirical phenomenon unique to the Arctic seabed resulting in unprecedented methane venting - uncovered by Dr Natalia Shakhova and Dr Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Center - the critics refer instead to general theoretical dynamics of methane release but show little awareness of what's actually going on in the north pole:
"The mechanism which is causing the observed mass of rising methane plumes in the East Siberian Sea is itself unprecedented and hence it is not surprising that various climate scientists, none of them Arctic specialists, failed to spot it. What is actually happening is that the summer sea ice now retreats so far, and for so long each summer, that there is a substantial ice-free season over the Siberian shelf, sufficient for solar irradiance to warm the surface water by a significant amount – up to 7C according to satellite data.
That warming extends the 50 m or so to the seabed because we are dealing with only a polar surface water layer here (over the shelves the Arctic Ocean structure is one-layer rather than three layers) and the surface warming is mixed down by wave-induced mixing because the extensive open water permits large fetches.
So long as some ice persisted on the shelf, the water mass was held to about 0C in summer because any further heat content in the water column was used for melting the ice underside. But once the ice disappears, as it has done, the temperature of the water can rise significantly, and the heat content reaching the seabed can melt the frozen sediments at a rate that was never before possible. The authors who so confidently dismiss the idea of extensive methane release are simply not aware of the new mechanism that is causing it."
Wadhams thus describes the previous research dismissing the methane threat by Rupple and others as "rendered obsolete by the Semiletov/Shakhova field experiments - the seeing - and the mechanism described above."
So far, cutting edge peer-reviewed research on the link between Arctic permafrost melt and methane release has received no attention from these critics. Indeed, their offhand dismissals are based on ignoring the potential implications of the specific empirical evidence on the ESAS emerging over the last few years, which challenges the assumptions of conventional modelling.





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Himalaya glacier melting

Wildfires Causing Melting in Low-Lying Himalayan Glaciers
Wildfires Responsible for More Warming Than Previously Thought



ENN,
19 July, 2013


Washington DC – A new study by Indian glaciologists suggests black carbon from forest fires may affect the “reflectance” or albedo of glaciers in a manner that reduces their mass balance.  The report indicates that the change in reflectance in 2009 was higher than in any other year from 2000 to 2012 and could only be explained by the extensive forest fires that year, the number of which was significantly higher than any other year between 2001 and 2010.   The scientists noted that many small low-altitude Himalayan glaciers are currently melting by as much as 1 meter per year, more than double previous estimates.



In addition to the Indian study, a new study conducted by researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory has found that climate models have underestimated the contribution of wildfires to global warming.  Existing climate models assume that wildfires emit a mixture of warming black carbon particles along with organic carbon, thought to cause cooling by reflecting sunlight.  The combination and ratio of the two types of particles was thought to cause net cooling or a neutral climate effect.



The researchers, who began looking at wildfires after the 2011 Las Conchas fire threatened their own laboratory, found that wildfires also emit tiny, black balls of tar, at a rate ten times higher than these other particles.  Further the black and organic carbon emitted by the fires are covered in an organic coating which acts like a lens to focus sunlight, increasing the warming by a factor of 2 or more.



A series of studies led by Dr. V. Ramanathan of Scripps Institute of Oceanography have also found that that co-called brown carbon has a more a potent warming impact than many models account for, offsetting up to 60 to 90% of the cooling caused by other lighter organic carbons.  Based on recent field studies Dr. Ramanathan and co-researchers estimate that the warming contribution of brown carbon causes organic carbon’s net impact to be close to zero, meaning that it does not offset the warming caused by co-emitted black carbon, which has been estimated to be the second most powerful climate forcer, behind only CO2.



“The combination of these findings has important implications for climate models and climate mitigation,” said Durwood Zaelke, President of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development. “Wildfires and agricultural burning in Africa, Asia, and South America, once thought to have little or no effect on the climate may contribute significantly to global warming.”



“Wildfires are only expected to increase as the climate warms,” added Zaelke.  “So urgent action to reduce the rate of warming immediately can contribute to limiting such positive feedbacks, where the consequences of increased warming, such as forest fires, themselves increase warming.


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Chinese slowdown

Dragon Drags On: China's slowdown sends ripples of fear around world

After years of China's rapid growth and development, the world's second largest economy appears to be slowing down. The government is expecting the lowest rate of economic expansion in more than two decades - at 7.5 percent. James Corbett, editor of The Corbett Report news website, joins RT to talk more on China and its place in the global economy.



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Ice-free winters during the Pliocene

Ice-Free Arctic Winters Could Explain Amplified Warming During Pliocene
Year-round ice-free conditions across the surface of the Arctic Ocean could explain why Earth was substantially warmer during the Pliocene Epoch than it is today, despite similar concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to new research carried out at the University of Colorado Boulder.


29 July, 2013

In early May, instruments at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii marked a new record: The concentration of carbon dioxide climbed to 400 parts per million for the first time in modern history.

The last time researchers believe the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere reached 400 ppm -- between 3 and 5 million years ago during the Pliocene -- Earth was about 3.5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer (2 to 5 degrees Celsius) than it is today. During that time period, trees overtook the tundra, sprouting right to the edges of the Arctic Ocean, and the seas swelled, pushing ocean levels 65 to 80 feet higher.

Scientists' understanding of the climate during the Pliocene has largely been pieced together from fossil records preserved in sediments deposited beneath lakes and on the ocean floor.

"When we put 400 ppm carbon dioxide into a model, we don't get as warm a planet as we see when we look at paleorecords from the Pliocene," said Jim White, director of CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and co-author of the new study published online in the journal Palaeogeography, Paleoclimatology, Palaeoecology. "That tells us that there may be something missing in the climate models."

Scientists have proposed several hypotheses in the past to explain the warmer Pliocene climate. One idea, for example, was that the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, the narrow strip of land linking North and South America, could have altered ocean circulations during the Pliocene, forcing warmer waters toward the Arctic. But many of those hypotheses, including the Panama possibility, have not proved viable.

For the new study, led by Ashley Ballantyne, a former CU-Boulder doctoral student who is now an assistant professor of bioclimatology at the University of Montana, the research team decided to see what would happen if they forced the model to assume that the Arctic was free of ice in the winter as well as the summer during the Pliocene. Without these additional parameters, climate models set to emulate atmospheric conditions during the Pliocene show ice-free summers followed by a layer of ice reforming during the sunless winters.

"We tried a simple experiment in which we said, 'We don't know why sea ice might be gone all year round, but let's just make it go away,' " said White, who also is a professor of geological sciences. "And what we found was that we got the right kind of temperature change and we got a dampened seasonal cycle, both of which are things we think we see in the Pliocene."

In the model simulation, year-round ice-free conditions caused warmer conditions in the Arctic because the open water surface allowed for evaporation. Evaporation requires energy, and the water vapor then stored that energy as heat in the atmosphere. The water vapor also created clouds, which trapped heat near the planet's surface.

"Basically, when you take away the sea ice, the Arctic Ocean responds by creating a blanket of water vapor and clouds that keeps the Arctic warmer," White said.

White and his colleagues are now trying to understand what types of conditions could bridge the standard model simulations with the simulations in which ice-free conditions in the Arctic are imposed. If they're successful, computer models would be able to model the transition between a time when ice reformed in the winter to a time when the ocean remained devoid of ice throughout the year.

Such a model also would offer insight into what could happen in our future. Currently, about 70 percent of sea ice disappears during the summertime before reforming in the winter.

"We're trying to understand what happened in the past but with a very keen eye to the future and the present," White said. "The piece that we're looking at in the future is what is going to happen as the Arctic Ocean warms up and becomes more ice-free in the summertime.


"Will we continue to return to an ice-covered Arctic in the wintertime? Or will we start to see some of the feedbacks that now aren't very well represented in our climate models? If we do, that's a big game changer."
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Feeling this pain won’t kill you; not feeling WILL

Derrick Jensen: Against Forgetting



27 July, 2013

Last night a host of nonhuman neighbors paid me a visit. First, two gray foxes sauntered up, including an older female who lost her tail to a leghold trap six or seven years ago. They trotted back into a thicker part of the forest, and a few minutes later a raccoon ambled forward. After he left I saw the two foxes again. Later, they went around the right side of a redwood tree as a black bear approached around the left. He sat on the porch for a while, and then walked off into the night. Then the foxes returned, hung out, and, when I looked away for a moment then looked back, they were gone. It wasn’t too long before the bear returned to lie on the porch. After a brief nap, he went away. The raccoon came back and brought two friends. When they left the foxes returned, and after the foxes came the bear. The evening was like a French farce: As one character exited stage left, another entered stage right.

Although I see some of these nonhuman neighbors daily, I was entranced and delighted to see so many of them over the span of just one evening. I remained delighted until sometime the next day, when I remembered reading that, prior to conquest by the Europeans, people in this region could expect to see a grizzly bear every 15 minutes.

This phenomenon is something we all encounter daily, even if some of us rarely notice it. It happens often enough to have a name: declining baselines. The phrase describes the process of becoming accustomed to and accepting as normal worsening conditions. Along with normalization can come a forgetting that things were not always this way. And this can lead to further acceptance and further normalization, which leads to further amnesia, and so on. Meanwhile the world is killed, species by species, biome by biome. And we are happy when we see the ever-dwindling number of survivors.

I’ve gone on the salmon-spawning tours that local environmentalists give, and I’m not the only person who by the end is openly weeping. If we’re lucky, we see 15 fish. Prior to conquest there were so many fish the rivers were described as “black and roiling.” And it’s not just salmon. Only five years ago, whenever I’d pick up a piece of firewood, I’d have to take off a half-dozen sowbugs. It’s taken me all winter this year to see as many. And I used to go on spider patrol before I took a shower, in order to remove them to safety before the deluge. I still go on spider patrol, but now it’s mostly pro forma. The spiders are gone. My mother used to put up five hummingbird feeders, and the birds would fight over those. Now she puts up two, and as often as not the sugar ferments before anyone eats it. I used to routinely see bats in the summer. Last year I saw one.

You can transpose this story to wherever you live and whatever members of the nonhuman community live there with you. I was horrified a few years ago to read that many songbird populations on the Atlantic Seaboard have collapsed by up to 80 percent over the last 40 years. But, and this is precisely the point, I was even more horrified when I realized that Silent Spring came out more than 40 years ago, so this 80 percent decline followed an already huge decline caused by pesticides, which followed another undoubtedly huge decline caused by the deforestation, conversion to agriculture, and urbanization that followed conquest.

My great-grandmother grew up in a sod house in Nebraska. When she was a tiny girl—in other words, only four human generations ago—there were still enough wild bison on the Plains that she was afraid lightning storms would spook them and they would trample her home. Who in Nebraska today worries about being trampled by bison? For that matter, who in Nebraska today even thinks about bison on a monthly, much less daily, basis?

This state of affairs is problematic for many reasons, not the least of which is that it’s harder to fight for what you don’t love than for what you do, and it’s hard to love what you don’t know you’re missing. It’s harder still to fight an injustice you do not perceive as an injustice but rather as just the way things are. How can you fight an injustice you never think about because it never occurs to you that things have ever been any different?

Declining baselines apply not only to the environment but to many fields. Take surveillance. Back in the 1930s, there were people who freaked out at the notion of being assigned a Social Security number, as it was “a number that will follow you from cradle to grave.” But since 9/11, according to former National Security Agency official William Binney, the U.S. government has been retaining every email sent, in case any of us ever does anything the government doesn’t like. How many people complain about that? And it’s not just the government. I received spam birthday greetings this year from all sorts of commercial websites. How and why does ESPN.com have my birth date? And remember the fight about GMOs? They were perceived as scary (because they are), and now they’re all over the place, but most people don’t know or don’t care. The same goes for nanotechnology.

Yesterday I ate a strawberry. Or rather, I ate a strawberry-shaped object that didn’t have much taste. When did we stop noticing that strawberries/plums/tomatoes no longer taste like what they resemble? In my 20s I rented a house where a previous resident’s cat had pooped all over the dirt basement, which happened to be where the air intakes for the furnace were located. The house smelled like cat feces. After I’d been there a few months, I wrote to a friend, “At first the smell really got to me, but then, as with everything, I got used to the stench and it just doesn’t bother me anymore.”

This is a process we need to stop. Milan Kundera famously wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Everything in this culture is aimed at helping to distract us from—or better, help us to forget—the injustices, the pain. And it is completely normal for us to want to be distracted from or to forget pain. Pain hurts. Which is why on every level from somatic reflex to socially constructed means of denial we have pathways to avoid it.

But here is what I want you to do: I want you to go outside. I want you to listen to the (disappearing) frogs, to watch the (disappearing) fireflies. Even if you’re in a city—especially if you’re in a city—I want you to picture the land as it was before the land was built over. I want you to research who lived there. I want you to feel how it was then, feel how it wants to be. I want you to begin keeping a calendar of who you see and when: the first day each year you see buttercups, the first day frogs start singing, the last day you see robins in the fall, the first day for grasshoppers. In short, I want you to pay attention.

If you do this, your baseline will stop declining, because you’ll have a record of what’s being lost.

Do not go numb in the face of this data. Do not turn away. I want you to feel the pain. Keep it like a coal inside your coat, a coal that burns and burns. I want all of us to do this, because we should all want the pain of injustice to stop. We should want this pain to stop not because we get used to it and it just doesn’t bother us anymore, but because we stop the injustices and destruction that are causing the pain in the first place. I want us to feel how awful the destruction is, and then act from this feeling.

And I promise you two things. One: Feeling this pain won’t kill you. And two: Not feeling this pain, continuing to go numb and avoid it, will.


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Antarctic melt


Permafrost Melting Faster Than Expected in Antarctica


25 July, 2013

Unlike the Arctic Circle up north, where once-permanent sea ice began melting and miles of permafrost began thawing decades ago, the ground ice in Antarctica’s Garwood Valley was generally considered stable. In this remote polar region near the iceberg-encrusted Ross Sea, temperatures actually became colder from 1986 to 2000, then stabilized, while the climate in much of the rest of the world warmed during that same period.

But now, the ice in Antarctica is melting as rapidly as in the Arctic.
That’s not because temperatures are rising. A team of researchers has discovered that increased solar radiation is thawing ground ice in Garwood Valley at an accelerated rate, disrupting normal seasonal ice patterns.
The cause of the increased solar radiation is, for now, uncertain, although it is related to changes in weather patterns. More research will be required to determine why it is happening.
“I’m a geologist—I look down,” explained Joseph Levy, one of two University of Texas at Austin scientists on the research team and co-author of the research paper in Scientific Reports. “The next step is to figure out what’s driving this change in sunlight patterns. It’s going to involve working with meteorologists and climate modelers.”
Antarctica is predicted to warm during the coming century. As a result, the ground ice could melt even more quickly, which would cause more serious sinking and buckling of the landscape.
Few creatures will notice the collapse of these barren landscapes, and the ones that will are mostly microscopic. The Garwood Valley is home to microorganisms, lichens, and algal mats (thin layers of algae and cyanobacteria that are found in the continent’s seasonal streams). Its top predator, according to Levy, is a nematode—a roundworm that is only a millimeter long. But this ancient, almost untouched part of the world has surprising scientific value.
“What makes Antarctica work, and what makes science there important, is not that it’s exotic and far away, but that it tells us fundamental things about how biological systems work, and how the earth system works,” Levy said. “If you want to understand how organisms are going to respond to climate change—whether they are people, crops, or livestock—[then] a good thing to do is to look at the simplest organism you can find, like a nematode [or] an algal mat, and ask, ‘How is this creature adapting?’”
Levy spends about two months* every year in Antarctica’s dry valleys, documenting how they are changing. When he arrives in October, temperatures are around -22 degrees Fahrenheit. It is so cold that almost everything freezes— food, batteries, electronics, beer, etc. The scientists have to zip their laptops inside their parkas to warm them up enough to operate. Antarctica’s harsh conditions are the earth’s best approximation of life in another cold, dry place that Levy studies: Mars.
LANDSAT IMAGE MOSAIC OF ANTARCTICA. Garwood Valley lies within the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica.
Despite the challenges, Levy says the work is exciting, and the location is exotic. To get there, the research team takes a regular commercial airliner to New Zealand. From there, they board a U.S. military plane that flies them to McMurdo Station, a U.S. research center located on an island in the Ross Sea. Then, the team is flown by helicopter to Garwood Valley. During the Antarctic summer, they are among approximately 50 people living and conducting research in an area the size of Delaware.
“You’re alone with nature, and you can really explore to your heart’s content,” Levy said. “You can run your experiments without fear of interference, without worry about it getting dark. In the summer, it’s light 24 hours a day. It’s a place where you wake up in the morning, you have a question, and you go out and answer it.”
He describes the area as “beautiful in a desolate kind of way”—a place of “sharp mountain peaks and wide, U-shaped valleys.” As someone who has spent a great deal of time in this remote place, he is familiar with the surprising ways in which it has recently changed.
“Every year that I’m back, the ice cliff is different,” said Levy, referring to a research site in Garwood Valley that was brought to the scientists’ attention by a helicopter pilot. “Every year you come back, and basically, the hill [looks] like a big backhoe came in and scooped out the equivalent of a couple of cubic yards of ice and sediment.”
This is simply the effect that increased solar radiation has had on Garwood Valley. But what about global warming? For now, Antarctica is shielded from parts of the global climate system by notoriously strong winds and ocean currents that circle the continent, keeping cold air in and warm air out. But fifty years from now, Levy says, global warming will have reached Antarctica, potentially producing more dramatic changes.
And if temperatures rise a couple of degrees by the end of the century, as predicted, then more Antarctic ice will melt and destabilization will occur along the continent’s coasts.
The accelerated melting of the permafrost in Garwood Valley, Levy explained, serves as a “crystal ball” that provides insights into Antarctica’s future.
“The big concern is that the beginning of accelerated melting of the permafrost in the dry valleys is a sign of things to come,” Levy said. “It’s not the end of Antarctica as we know it, but it may be the beginning of the end. It’s a sign that places we think are stable, places where we don’t have an impact, actually, our footprint can be felt there. It’s important to study these places [and] get that baseline data now, because in the coming decades, this is where change is really going to be apparent.”

*Clarification: this article originally stated that Levy spends five months in Antarctica every year. That is the length of the season. Levy spends around two months there. 
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