[Lamplighter]

At least this writer still has something of a sense of humor...


Natural World Report - 7/30/15 - Ian Lang

It’s a common theme when discussing Washington, DC to suggest that the political environment sinks lower every year,
slowly descending to a level where barely-sentient politicians fling poo at one another.
It’s also a popular joke that Washington, DC is build on an unstable swamp.

One of those things is definitely not true, but nonetheless geologists from the University of Vermont have found
that the land under the Chesapeake Bay – including Washington, DC – is literally sinking.
…
The sinking has to do with something called a forebulge, and its continued collapse.
Tens of thousands of years ago, during the last ice age,
a humongous ice sheet covering northern North America weighed so much
that it pushed the land around it away. In turn, that cause the land even further south to bulge upward.
Once the ice sheet began melting 20,000 years ago, the forebulge has slowly shrunk.
…
People didn’t melt the prehistoric ice sheet, and there’s precious little we could do to stop the land from leveling out.
Where climate change does come in, however, is the fact that the waters
of the Chesapeake Bay are rising at twice the global average rate and faster than elsewhere on the East Coast.
...
“It’s ironic that the nation’s capital—the place least responsive to the dangers of climate change
is sitting in one of the worst spots it could be in terms of this land subsidence,” said Paul Bierman,
a UVM geologist and the senior author on the new paper.
“Will the Congress just sit there with their feet getting ever wetter?

What’s next, forebulge denia l?”