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Archive for August, 2011

The sun has just set at the top of the world, and the weather in that neck of the woods is about as lousy as you would expect. The temperature dropped to 4 degrees Fahrenheit earlier this week at the world’s northernmost outpost, Alert, in Canada’s Nunavut territory.

Another Arctic winter is coming.

Nevertheless, the high Arctic is still the epicenter of global climate change, and the scientific and policy controversies that surround the topic. Much of the region has just experienced another abnormally warm summer. Springtime snowpack was extremely low across Siberia, which set the stage for thawing breezes to blow offshore toward the Arctic Ocean’s ice pack. This followed a freakishly warm winter – part of last winter’s strong La Nina event – over Greenland and eastern Canada, which left that typically frigid locale almost devoid of sea ice last season.

The Mayan Calendar measures a Long Year. A Long Year is 26,000 orbits of the Earth around the Sun. One Earth orbit of the Sun is one Earth Year. An Earth Year ends on the 31st December, every year. The Mayan Calendar ends on the 21st December 2012. It starts again on the 22nd December 2012, which is the first day of a new Long Year. The 22nd December 2012 is a Mayan New Year’s Day. The end of a Long Year is co-incidental with the alignment of the Earth, the Sun and the Galactic Centre on the Winter Solstice. On the Winter Solstice of 21st December 2012, the sun will rise above the horizon and be in direct alignment with the exact centre of our Milky Way Galaxy. Due to the rotation of the Heliosphere around the axis of our Sun, this will not occur for another 26,000 years, at which time it will mark the end of another Long Year of the Mayan Calendar, should the Maya still be here to celebrate it.