Word: glacial
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Something you’ve always wanted to tell someone: “By all means move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me.” (from “The Devil Wears Prada?...
...secret that post-rockers Sigur Rós make music that reflects their Icelandic roots: ethereally beautiful, pastoral, and momentous, yet glacial in its motions. The quartet distills the essence of their homeland into extended experimental records that occasionally pay lip service to classical and pop music, but nonetheless remain firmly rooted in their own world. The group never concede a shred of their perfectly-structured compositions for the sake of accessibility, and in fact, their lyrics are often sung in a gibberish language of the band’s invention...
Glaciers are thought to change at, well, a glacial pace. Certainly that has been true throughout the planet's history. The current ice age - known as the Pilocene-Quatenary glaciation, which began 2.6 million years ago - has witnessed some 20 cycles of glacial (freezing) and interglacial (thawing) periods, with ice sheets advancing and retreating completely on roughly 100,000-year time scales. But scientists are unsure exactly what prompts the shifts in cycles...
...glacial periods, vast ice sheets cover much of the planet, and sea levels are as much as 130 meters lower than they are today (all that extra water is locked up in ice). During interglacial periods - we are enjoying one now, East Coast blizzards notwithstanding - the ice sheets retreat, the glaciers melt and sea level rises. The expansive but quickly melting ice sheets of Greenland, the North Pole and Antarctica are all that is left of our last glacial period, which reached its peak about 20,000 years...
...shifting faster than scientists thought, which may have consequences in a warming world. A team of scientists traveled to the Spanish island of Mallorca, where they visited a coastal cave that has been submerged off and on by the Mediterranean Sea for hundreds of thousand of years, as glacial periods have waxed and waned. They dated the layers of the mineral calcite, which were deposited by the seawater in rings on the cave walls, as on a bathtub...