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jameshart

Huh

> they have been observed in Alaska, Chile, Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Uganda and Venezuela

Well, today I learned, Venezuela has glaciers.

Then I googled that, and…

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/08/...

And so today I learned, Venezuela used to have glaciers.

View on HN

Interestingly, the US has ADDED a glacier in the last 30 years, that of Mount St Helens, which was able to form after the explosion in 1980. It is the youngest glacier on earth

It had 13 glaciers pre-eruption, so perhaps "added" is doing a lot of heavy lifting :)

West Papua still has glaciers, which I was surprised at.

I was amazed equatorial / tropical glaciers are much of a thing.

A sad search later:

"projected to vanish entirely in late 2026 or 2027"

They're at 4600m in elevation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carstensz_Glacier

They've apparently disappeared and returned a few times since the last iceage.

Yes, there have been a surprising number, and not just in the Andes and Himalayas where you would expect.

There have been a few in Africa in modern times. Some of them have disappeared.

We need to go nuclear with the newer type of plants. Built at scale, they are cost effective. Otherwise we are cooked, perhaps quite literally.

Venus scenario? I wonder if that could happen. Time to explore that rabbit hole

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astronauts

There are multiple hyper-warming scenarios that have been postulated over the years. Look up the clathrate gun, ocean circulation collapse, arctic albedo flip.. some are now considered unlikely.

I don't know if any would be a Venus scenario, probably not. But we don't really need that much warming to kill ourselves off. Average global temps in the Eucene were up to double what they are today, that would do the job :)

And while not all the way to Venus, Earth's history has multiple mass extinction catastrophes that have happened. Some have been due to things like asteroids, or volcanism but also just chemical imbalance. An ice age is small beans compared to those...

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