You take continuous samples of your water which is also is tagged with specific isotopes. You use the isotopes to determine the extent of your contamination and you have samples to know exactly with what you are contaminating.

Can't. Illegal per the Antarctica Treaty.

As someone who researches subglacial lakes, I will note that the Russians put out the "we're breaking through this year" press release.... every year. It's Feb 1. They don't have the equipment. Odds are low that they'll finish the last 10 meters. #jussayin

they might both be old, but I think PIG is actually moving faster than most Floridans. ~10-20 feet per day. Seems like an exciting race between the geriatric and PIG...

PIG is named for Pine Island Bay, into which PIG flows. Pine Island Bay, in turn, is named for the USS Pine Island, which, in turn, was named for the Pine Island Sound in Florida. Ergo Pine Island Glacier is named after... Florida? Great.

We do have microphones down there in the form of passive seismometers. I believe they are deploying more on PIG as part of the field season this year. If not, there are some on Thwaites right next door. I also would like to reiterate Ted's point that this is nothing to get entirely worked up over, though it's really…

Left my water bottle on a United plane. Asked a gate agent to get it. Pause. Looked at me like I was crazy. "Just go back and get it..." Easy as pie.

"unconstitutionally overbroad"? Is that some sort of weird Freudian slip?

Well I'm glad I got punched in the face by cop for no reason in Chicago rather than tased (tazed?), I guess...

If you want to get into some science about this, read Kogan et al., 2008 (here). Deployed GPS and accelerometers to the Verrazano-Narrows bridge during the 2004 marathon...

@LiC: Ehhh, I would argue the whole world has been lidar'd. ICESat was operational for nominally 17 campaigns between 2003 and 2009, on 33-day repeat orbits. So we do have a global laser altimetry dataset. Now you can argue based on the 65 m footprint (small) and quick repeats (33-days) that we don't have global…

@funakoshi.gichin.shotokan: Among other things, yes. That's the main one.

@cinnfhaelidh23: All the data is tide corrected I would imagine. The wake behind India is real (GRACE shows it too).

@minibeardeath: We do. It's because where there's tectonics, there's thicker crust (e.g. crustal root under the Himalaya, subducted crust underthe Marianas Trench region, etc.) More crust = more mass = more gravity. For the Iceland hotspot, the mantle is basically at the surface. Mantle = denser = more mass = more…

@Lite: an adventurer is me!: Isotope ratios don't lie. Yes you can skew the stats through dilution, but as long as you know (or estimate) the end-members of your system, you can calculate the exact dilution. Using ultra-clean methods, you can realistically measure certain elemental isotope ratios in femtograms of…

@Lite: an adventurer is me!: Because I'm no longer a geochemist. Switched to glaciology. Well that and I have a master's thesis to defend in... 63 hours. Kinda cramped for time here.

@Lite: an adventurer is me!: Pretty easy isotope equation to back calculate the ratio of conflict/non-conflict mineral if we have an ore sample from both places. All you need an mass spectrometer. I smell some Earth Science undergraduate theses... Step 1: Rip apart electronics. Step 2: Find ores from non-conflict…