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Greenland’s ice sheet is releasing huge amounts of mercury into rivers
- salmonellaeater 5y agoWayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20210524233617/https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releasing-huge-amounts-of-mercury-into-rivers-2/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210524233617/https://thehackpo...
- dang 5y agoWe've banned the originally submitted site as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27293941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27293941.
- iab 5y agohttps://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releasing-huge-amounts-of-mercury-into-rivers-2/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:... Just so that you have the ability to fully ruin your day
- dang 5y agoWe've banned that site and changed the URL above to the article it ripped off and didn't link to, which is like 95th percentile blogspam shamelessness. In this case they even lifted the title as well. That clears 99. Submitted URL was https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releasing-huge-amounts-of-mercury-into-rivers-2/ https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releas.... By the way, for anyone interested, an easy way to bust these is simply to pick a likely-unique string from the article you suspect of being a ripoff and google it with quotes around it. If there's a more original source, it will probably come up: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22It+is+a+region+that+contains+both+lots+of+melting+glaciers+and+Indigenous+communities%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22It+is+a+region+that+conta... Sometimes I have to do this a few times before hitting the jackpot, but in my experience: if content looks copied, it probably is.
- perihelions 5y ago"simply to pick a likely-unique string from the article you suspect of being a ripoff and google it with quotes around it" There's also a subtype that deliberately circumvents this trick. There is a type of ad fraudster that rips off of, e.g. native German-speaking writers, runs their work through machine translation, and publishes the English output as original. I encountered several examples on some technical subs on Reddit (not yet on HN). It took a disproportionate amount of effort to unmask even one -- the method that ended up succeeding was to guess which technical terms could be idempotent under translation, and (&&) some together until the result set is small enough. (It's harder to reverse translate, because unless you're an expert translator, you probably don't know what the source language was). I've only seen a handful of these, but because of how difficult it is to detect, I'd speculate there could be a sizeable population in the wild. The writing is technically correct and non-suspicious, because it's written by a human expert in another language. It strongly resists reverse Google searches. And it resists social unmasking, because social groups who speak different languages tend to have distance between them. It's a clever evil.
- dang 5y agoExcellent point. Links would be interesting if you happen to have any.
- perihelions 5y agoI very briefly skimmed Reddit for examples. This one is /r/physics' 4th-most-upvoted post from this week, and hasn't been detected yet. It algorithmically substitutes random words for their synonyms (poorly); not the machine language translation I promised, but it's performing the same goal of resisting phrase matching. “We knew that the first direct image of a black hole would be groundbreaking,” said Kazuhiro Hada of the “We knew that the first uninterrupted image of a black hole would be revolutionary,” says Kazuhiro Hada of the Original is [0] and plagiarized is [1] (linked indirectly because the other URL is probably blacklisted on here, and possibly malicious). This one was the cleanest of several examples I found*. I think the technique is widespread and broadly successful, based on my anecdotal experience. It's easy to find a diversity of examples in smaller-sized Reddit subs, the ones with less paranoid moderation and spam AI settings. The machine translation examples are far harder to detect (to me); I'll update you if I discover one again in the future. The ones I found several years back appear to no longer exist. [0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/telescopes-unite-in-unprecedented-observations-of-famous-black-hole https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/telescopes-unite-in-unpreceden... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/njbrec/data_from_19_observatories_released_today_promise/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/njbrec/data_from_1... * (Because I could reliably identify the original document, and because the edit of a direct quotation from a named individual is an air-tight example of fraud).
- mywacaday 5y agoWhatever global warming does to the planet I'm fairly sure we haven't anticipated the worst side effects.
- Guest42 5y agoI’m a little disappointed it got renamed as “climate change” because that phrase doesn’t have the same level of urgency to it although it is technically more accurate.
- legutierr 5y agoYeah, that was precisely the point.
- czep 5y agoIt used to be called "pollution". Reframing the topic as global warming or climate change was a dedicated effort to soften the language and introduce room for doubt. I mean, everyone agrees that pollution sounds bad and is bad and we should stop doing it. But by calling it climate change, suddenly there's now an avenue to challenge its legitimacy, and shift attention onto the ideological debates. Meanwhile, as everyone is distracted, industry gets a free pass to continue polluting with zero consequences.
- jeffbee 5y agoEh, it's not the same thing as pollution. Pollution to me invokes the process where you invent something unnatural and dump it into the environment, such as tetrachloroethylene. Whereas putting CO2 in the atmosphere is a completely normal natural process, and the amount we've added has "only" about doubled the usual concentration. It's categorically different because unlike TCE, which will kill you on the spot if you drink it, the downsides of CO2 are not instantly obvious.
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- Proven 5y ago10% of global discharge. Move along, nothing to see here
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoA big tangent but I remember a podcast with Sir David King, UK chief scientific advisor - So, Sir David, what's worries you most? - The Greenland Ice Sheet. If it melts human civilisation is finished. - oh. And err is it melting? - Yes, and accelerating. - Oh.
- samatman 5y agoEstimates of total Greenland contributions to sea-level rise by 2100 range from a low of 2.1cm to a high of 5cm. I'm going to choose to worry about other things. https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-climate-models-suggest-faster-melting-of-the-greenland-ice-sheet https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-climate-models-suggest-faste... Those of you downvoting me to banish your anxiety should find a healthier outlet for your issues.
- bregma 5y agoYes, but up to 7 m over the next 200,000 years. You might want to short boardwalk futures.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ska 5y agoI'm not sure where you got those. IPCC 2019 report estimated the Greenland contributions in the 10-30cm range, and the link you gave is mostly about newer models suggesting a bit higher than 2019 IPCC, so suggest at the higher end (or above) of that range. The only related thing I could find in your linked report was to estimate contributions up by 2.6cm/2.8 cm/5cm (different scenarios) from CMIP5 to CMIP6, not in total. Maybe I missed something?
- jeffbee 5y agoThere are unimaginable mineral resources under the Greenland ice sheet, stuff that literate humans have never seen and which is therefore not describe in any history. There should be enormous boulders of pure copper, rich deposits of gold, silver, and lead, and of course mercury. Greenland without its ice sheet will be like a museum of pre-human geology.
- pcrh 5y agoThis is akin to the "unimaginable" resources in asteroids. By and large, we really don't need more resources to mine, but to use what we have more efficiently. I'm sure there are a few edge cases, but the attitude that we should look for more and more to exploit is what leads to deforestation, the biggest loss of species diversity since the last ice age, global warming and a serious toll on the health of today's people.
- dheera 5y agoI really hope at some point in the future we will have the tech to arbitrarily convert a pile of one element into a pile of another element. Without that, colonizing other planets is going to be hard.
- leafmeal 5y agoThis sounds really interesting and would love to learn more about this. Do you know of any resources, articles, books, etc. that talk about this?
- spicyramen 5y agoGreenland just looks bigger in the maps
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoOddly enough, Greenland and Saudi Arabia are almost the same size.
- casefields 5y agoI knew that all maps are distorted but holy cow.
- godelski 5y agoThis specifically mentions indigenous people, but unfortunately I don't think many people actually care about them (besides surface level). But how does this affect the average person's food supply? Don't we get a lot of fish/seafood from the arctic? Tuna and crab for example? Seems like it would affect fisheries in the north east of northern America and as well as northern Europe. That seems like a big deal for a lot of people. Does anyone have any more information on this? I imagine a lot of people depend on these regions for food.
- est31 5y agoThere is also the ticking time bomb of the Camp Century remains: > In 2016, a group of scientists evaluated the environmental impact and estimated that due to changing weather patterns over the next few decades, melt water could release the nuclear waste, 200,000 liters of diesel fuel, a nontrivial quantity of PCBs, and 24 million liters of untreated sewage into the environment as early as the year 2090. Transition in ice sheet surface mass balance at Camp Century from net accumulation to net ablation is plausible within the next 75 years under one climate model, and after another 44 to 88 years the buried wastes could be exposed between 2135 and 2179. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century#Residual_environmental_hazards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century#Residual_environm...
- refurb 5y agoIs that really a ticking time bomb? We have massive oil spills all the time and Vancouver still pumps raw sewage into the ocean. A concern and one we should fix, but a time bomb?