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March 3, 2006
Greenlandic only, suggests Siumut Party
Greenlandic should be only language we use, and only the Greenlandic language should be used in city and community governments, by the home rule government and in the legislative assembly: that was the proposal made by the Siumut Party’s Lars Emil Johansen last month in Greenland’s legislative assembly.
Johansen said this proposal should not be seen as an unfriendly plan.
“When people from other countries move to Denmark, the society requires them to speak Danish. If you cannot speak Danish, then you don’t have opportunities. In Greenland, we are not used to defending the Greenlandic language, but I am ready to now, on behalf of the Siumut Party,” he said.
Some of the MLAs in Greenland’s opposition Demokrates Party are Danish-speaking and cannot speak Greenlandic.
March 3, 2006
Arctic ice melt is “significant,” say scientists
About 120 scientists from 11 countries met recently in Winnipeg to discuss their findings from the Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Study, a year-long expedition aboard the Canadian research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen.
As part of the project, scientists sampled ice in the Western Arctic.
David Barber, a sea ice specialist at the University of Manitoba, told the Canadian Press that polar ice is melting at a rate of about 74,000 square kilometres each year and has been for the last 30 years.
“This is a very significant result, and it’s not some sort of trend that’s going to shift back the other way,” Dr. Barber told Canadian Press.
March 3, 2006
Peace column for Iceland
Yoko Ono, widow of the late musician John Lennon, came to Reykjavik, Iceland, last weekend to promote her concept for a peace column.
The work of art would be about 10 to 12 metres high and situated in Videy, an island about five minutes from Reykjavik. The column would be transparent and hollow. The idea, according to Ono, is to fill it with wishes of peace from all over the world.
Ono said wishes from her peace trees from all over the world could be put inside the column.
Ono said the column should only be accessible to the public one week a year, around John’s birthday, Oct. 9 (which is also their son Sean’s birthday).
Sean Lennon told reporters that he wasn’t worried about Iceland’s declaration of support for the United States war in Iraq. He said the only place with absolute peace would be the North Pole, but if the work of art was placed there, nobody would see it.
March 3, 2006
Want to go to C-C-mute?
In Greenland, young people and kids are using a lot of chat language in their daily communications, when they are MSN-ing and chatting on the Internet — and have developed a special language all their own.
“But we don’t have to worry,” said university student, Lona Lynge, who studies at Ilisimatusarfik, Greenland’s university, in Nuuk.
“Of course, their language is developing. They are only playing with words and do it in their free time, and even they talk to each other like they write, so we don’t have to worry that it will have impact on the Greelandic language,” 27-year old Lynge told the Sermitsiaq newspaper.
Chat language is a new area of research, she said.
“I’ve started studying the Greenlandic chat language which has not been investigated in depth before,” Lynge said.
Chat language is used only on private e-mails and messages, she said, and sent through the Internet and Internet relay chat.
Some examples include:
C-C-mute, (“Sisimiut” — a community’s name — in English, written as pronounced with an English accent);
Tuchats Laater (“Tusaqqissaagut,” we will hear from each other again, or “tusalaa”: shortening of “hear from you in a bit again” and the English word “later”).
March 3, 2006
Dire predictions for a future with unchecked global warming
A recently released report called Climate Change on the Millennial Timescale from the U.K. is the first study to examine the impacts of global warming beyond 2100 - and the findings aren’t encouraging.
By the year 3000, the report says:
• Global warming could have more than quadrupled, with temperature rises of as much as 15 C;
• Sea levels will still be rising by 2100, and the total increase could reach 11.4 metres;
• Abrupt climate changes are possible even after emissions cease because changes may be set in motion that cannot be stopped;
• The acidity of the oceans will go up, posing a threat to marine organisms such as corals and plankton. That, in turn, would affect the whole marine ecosystem.
The report says the changes could be even greater than this if the climate turns out to be more sensitive to greenhouse gas emissions than the study assumes. The solution, the team says, is to reduce emissions to zero by 2200. The report calls for continued efforts to cut the emission of global-warming gases to prevent climate change from getting out of control.
March 3, 2006
Greenland melt speeding up
Greenland’s glaciers are dumping more than twice as much ice into the Atlantic Ocean now as 10 years ago because glaciers are sliding off the land more quickly, say researchers. This means oceans will rise even faster than forecast, the researchers report in last week’s issue of the journal Science.
Glaciers around the world are disappearing quickly, several researchers told a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science.
“Greenland is probably going to contribute more and faster to sea level rise than predicted,” Eric Rignot of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology told a news conference.
Between 1996 and 2006, the amount of water lost from Greenland’s ice sheet has more than doubled. One glacier that once was stable is now disappearing at the rate of 14 km a year. Greenland now contributes about half a millimeter to the annual 3 mm rise in global sea levels.
Rising air temperatures are clearly a factor, researchers told the meeting. Over the last 20 years, the air temperature in southeast Greenland has risen by 3°C. Warmer air lubricates the bottoms of glaciers, helping them slide faster.
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