January 29, 2008 - Ellie took the puppies up to the vet to be neutered and spayed today. I had to meet my dad at lunch at the bank to sign some refinancing paperwork, and I left work a little early to meet Ellie to pick up the puppies after their surgery was done. We found out what is wrong with Bailey's leg. Apparently she has a trick knee, and might eventually need surgery to cut a deeper groove into one of the bones, so that her bone doesn't slip out of place. I can only imagine how expensive that procedure will be. After getting a gym membership yesterday at the Highland Rec Center, I went back today to use the facilities for the first time. The equipment is pretty similar to what was available to me on the cruise ship I worked on, except there are a few more weight machines. I used the ones I was familiar with first, and watched some other guy use a few of the ones I hadn't ever used, so I could figure out what to do with them. I also did about 1.5 miles on the treadmill. Then it was time to head home, eat dinner with Ellie, Casey, and Jamie, and then try out for Jeopardy online. The test was HARD! Way harder than I was expecting, with most of the questions revolving around pop culture, like book titles and movie producers, things I have no knowledge of. I'm going to continue my dissertation on 'global warming'. We'll call this part 2. I've already gone over the macroscopic thermodynamic generalizations, so now we need to look at a smaller scale than the universe. Let's look at what is known about the history of our planet. Geologists have determined that you can determine the relative age of mountains based on how 'sharp' they are. Sharpness indicates how long the mountain has been exposed to erosion, either from wind or water (which can include glacial movement as well as higher or lower ocean levels). From this, they have estimated that at times in the worlds history, the worlds oceans have been over and hundred feet higher and somewhat lower than where they are currently. Whether the changes in water level have occurred over millions of years or in a matter of a few years is highly debated, but no one disputes that levels have varied throughout the history of our planet. There is also evidence of past ice ages. Although it would be impossible to know the exact details of how many and how long they lasted, we have the remnants of the last one still lingering in the form of glaciers. Think of these as huge ice cubes. Because scientists have only been studying and measuring glaciers for a short period of time in our planets history (about 100 years out of our 2.5 billion year history), we can't say with certainty at what rate these glaciers grew or shrunk, we can only evaluate the data we have. Now, if glaciers are essentially giant ice cubes, the melting process of an ice cube on a kitchen table can be somewhat correlated to the melting process of a glacier sitting on a mountain. This would represent melting during the warmer summer months. During the winter, it would be more like an ice cube sitting in the fridge, and then as it gets really cold in the winter, like putting it back in the freezer. A few things can be observed. First, in the freezer, there is basically no melting because the surrounding temperature is low enough to keep the ice solid. As you move it into the fridge, the ice cube will slowly melt. Put it on the table, and the rate of melting increases. Move it back into the fridge and then the freezer, and rate of melting will slow and then eventually stop again. This is one observation. The second is that if you repeat this experiment, and actually measure the quantity of ice melting compared to the surface area of the ice cube, you'll see that as the surface area descreases, the rate of ice melting will increase. What this means is that when you put that original ice cube back in the freezer after one cycle of freezer, fridge, table, fridge, freezer, on the second round of freezing, due to the smaller surface area, the rate of melting will be greater. The rate of melting will increase during every cycle. We can't assume that a glacier the size of Montana will have the same melting rate as a small ice cube in my freezer, but we can generalize that the correlation between surface area and melt rate will still stand. It is because of this that we see that glaciers are melting at an increasing rate every year. To be continued in lesson 3.