Gabby Douglas, Adele among brightest young stars -Forbes magazine

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Fashion designer Carly Cushnie, actress Kate McKinnon and videogame creator Kim Swift may not be household names yet, but they are destined to do great things and will be tomorrow’s young stars, Forbes magazine said on Monday.

Along with Olympic Gold medalist gymnast Gabby Douglas, rapper Wiz Khalifa and researcher Josh Sommer, they have been chosen by the magazine for its “30 Under 30″ list of top achievers under 30 years old in their fields.

They are considered the top 30 achievers in 15 categories ranging from education, energy, music, science and healthcare to sports, technology games and apps and marketing.

“This is a celebration of youthful ambition and success. These are really amazing people and they are doing amazing things. It makes you very hopeful about the world,” Michael Noer, the executive editor of Forbes, said in an interview.

Many on the list, including singers Bruno Mars and Justin Bieber, as well as actresses Ashley and May Kate Olsen and fashion designer Alexander Wang, the newly appointed creative director at the French fashion house Balenciaga, are already well known.

Some are returnees to the list that was launched last year – like British singer and new mother Adele, the 24-year-old multiple Grammy Award winner, and American entrepreneur Kevin Systrom.

Noer said there has been a 60 percent turnover since 2011, so there are plenty of new faces on the list drawn up by Forbes staff and industry experts.

“I think there are a lot of interesting names on the list,” he said.

In energy, it is 28-year-old Leslie Dewan, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate and co-founder and chief science officer of Transatomic Power.

“They are developing a new type of nuclear reactor that uses nuclear waste,” said Noer.

In music, Pittsburgh-bred Khalifa, 25, topped the list. Swift, the 29-year-old creative director at Airtight Games, was noted for creating hit videogame Portal.

“Kate McKinnon, the actress from ‘Saturday Night Live’ who just joined in April is our Hollywood selection. She is being hailed as the next Tina Fey,” Noer said.

Sommer, the executive director of the Chordoma Foundation which raises funds for research into chordoma, a rare, slow-growing bone cancer most commonly found in the spine, is another young achiever, according to Forbes.

Sommer created the foundation with his mother after being diagnosed with the disease while a student at Duke University in North Carolina.

“He was diagnosed with a rare type of bone cancer, dropped out of school to find a cure and he has made some progress,” said Noer.

The full list will be published in the January 21 issue of Forbes and can also be found at www.forbes.com/under 30 .

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; editing by Paul Casciato and Mohammad Zargham)

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Ancient Bones That Tell a Story of Compassion

Lorna Tilley

DISABLED Almost all the other skeletons at the Man Bac site, south of Hanoi, are straight. But the man now called Burial 9 was laid to rest curled in a fetal position that suggests lifelong paralysis.

While it is a painful truism that brutality and violence are at least as old as humanity, so, it seems, is caring for the sick and disabled.

And some archaeologists are suggesting a closer, more systematic look at how prehistoric people — who may have left only their bones — treated illness, injury and incapacitation. Call it the archaeology of health care.

The case that led Lorna Tilley and Marc Oxenham of Australian National University in Canberra to this idea is that of a profoundly ill young man who lived 4,000 years ago in what is now northern Vietnam and was buried, as were others in his culture, at a site known as Man Bac.

Almost all the other skeletons at the site, south of Hanoi and about 15 miles from the coast, lie straight. Burial 9, as both the remains and the once living person are known, was laid to rest curled in the fetal position. When Ms. Tilley, a graduate student in archaeology, and Dr. Oxenham, a professor, excavated and examined the skeleton in 2007 it became clear why. His fused vertebrae, weak bones and other evidence suggested that he lies in death as he did in life, bent and crippled by disease.

They gathered that he became paralyzed from the waist down before adolescence, the result of a congenital disease known as Klippel-Feil syndrome. He had little, if any, use of his arms and could not have fed himself or kept himself clean. But he lived another 10 years or so.

They concluded that the people around him who had no metal and lived by fishing, hunting and raising barely domesticated pigs, took the time and care to tend to his every need.

“There’s an emotional experience in excavating any human being, a feeling of awe,” Ms. Tilley said, and a responsibility “to tell the story with as much accuracy and humanity as we can.”

This case, and other similar, if less extreme examples of illness and disability, have prompted Ms. Tilley and Dr. Oxenham to ask what the dimensions of such a story are, what care for the sick and injured says about the culture that provided it.

The archaeologists described the extent of Burial 9’s disability in a paper in Anthropological Science in 2009. Two years later, they returned to the case to address the issue of health care head on. “The provision and receipt of health care may therefore reflect some of the most fundamental aspects of a culture,” the two archaeologists wrote in The International Journal of Paleopathology.

And earlier this year, in proposing what she calls a “bioarchaeology of care,” Ms. Tilley wrote that this field of study “has the potential to provide important — and possibly unique — insights into the lives of those under study.” In the case of Burial 9, she says, not only does his care indicate tolerance and cooperation in his culture, but suggests that he himself had a sense of his own worth and a strong will to live. Without that, she says, he could not have stayed alive.

“I’m obviously not the first archaeologist” to notice evidence of people who needed help to survive in stone age or other early cultures, she said. Nor does her method “come out of the blue.” It is based on and extends previous work.

Among archaeological finds, she said, she knows “about 30 cases in which the disease or pathology was so severe, they must have had care in order to survive.” And she said there are certainly more such cases to be described. “I am totally confident that there are almost any number of case studies where direct support or accommodation was necessary.”

Such cases include at least one Neanderthal, Shanidar 1, from a site in Iraq, dating to 45,000 years ago, who died around age 50 with one arm amputated, loss of vision in one eye and other injuries. Another is Windover boy from about 7,500 years ago, found in Florida, who had a severe congenital spinal malformation known as spina bifida, and lived to around age 15. D. N. Dickel and G. H. Doran, from Florida State University wrote the original paper on the case in 1989, and they concluded that contrary to popular stereotypes of prehistoric people, “under some conditions life 7,500 years ago included an ability and willingness to help and sustain the chronically ill and handicapped.”

In another well-known case, the skeleton of a teenage boy, Romito 2, found at a site in Italy in the 1980s, and dating to 10,000 years ago, showed a form of severe dwarfism that left the boy with very short arms. His people were nomadic and they lived by hunting and gathering. He didn’t need nursing care, but the group would have had to accept that he couldn’t run at the same pace or participate in hunting in the same way others did.

Ms. Tilley gained her undergraduate degree in psychology in 1982 and worked in the health care industry studying treatment outcomes before coming to the study of archaeology. She said her experience influenced her interest in ancient health care.

What she proposes, in papers with Dr. Oxenham and in a dissertation in progress, is a standard four-stage method for studying ancient remains of disabled or ill individuals with an eye to understanding their societies. She sets up several stages of investigation: first, establishing what was wrong with a person; second, describing the impact of the illness or disability given the way of life followed in that culture; and third, concluding what level of care would have needed.

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Poland Finds It’s Not Immune to Euro Crisis

WARSAW — The Fiat factory in Tychy, Poland, has long been considered one of the most productive auto plants in Europe, often singled out for praise by the Italian company’s demanding chief executive, Sergio Marchionne.

Polish workers “always responded whenever I asked,” Mr. Marchionne said at the Paris Motor Show in October. “I feel an exceptional responsibility to the people there.”

So when Fiat said recently that it would lay off a third of the work force in Tychy, or about 1,500 people, it was a harsh reminder: Even with the healthiest big economy in Europe, Poland cannot escape the Continent’s economic downturn.

Polish growth is expected to slow to as little as 1.5 percent next year, according to World Bank estimates, from 2.1 percent this year. That still compares favorably with the neighboring euro zone, where most countries are either in recession or just barely growing. With a gross domestic product of €369.7 billion in 2011, according to the European data agency Eurostat, Poland ranked ninth among the 27 E.U. countries, just below Belgium and a rung above Austria.

During much of the region’s debt crisis so far, Poland has counted itself fortunate that the troubles began before the country had joined the euro currency union. By being part of the E.U.’s common market, but not bound by euro strictures, Poland has been one of the Continent’s rare economic good-news stories. But the deceleration in Polish growth, which has prompted the central bank to begin a series of interest rate cuts to stimulate the economy, has underscored the country’s exposure to slumping euro zone consumer markets.

The country’s long border with Germany, and its own skilled, low-cost labor force, make Poland an attractive place to make heavy consumer goods like cars and home appliances. General Motors’ Opel unit, suffering from many of the same maladies as Fiat, has a plant in Gliwice, though it has not announced job cuts there. Bosch, Whirlpool and Electrolux all make household appliances in Poland for the European market.

The country’s slowing growth is likely to put pressure on Polish leaders to address some underlying problems, notably an overbearing government bureaucracy.

“Luckily, we are doing quite well so far,” said Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, a former prime minister who now advises the current prime minister, Donald Tusk, on economic issues. Speaking at a recent conference co-convened by the International Herald Tribune in Warsaw, Mr. Bielecki added, “We still have some space for improvement.”

Yet, despite the economy’s slowing velocity, Warsaw remains a fount of optimism, with ambitions to be a regional financial center. The city somehow manages to seem cheerful, even with its legacy of drab Soviet-era architecture.

In downtown Warsaw recently, as a light snow fell, skaters pirouetted at a temporary ice rink set up in the shadow of the Palace of Culture and Science, a monstrous high-rise building built by order of Josef Stalin in the 1950s.

“I really believe Warsaw is becoming the capital of Central and Eastern Europe,” said Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, mayor of the city. “In these difficult times Warsaw offers not only dynamics but stability.”

Although Vienna emerged as the gateway to Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War, Warsaw has since surpassed it by some measures — like trading volume at the stock exchange.

And economic success has translated into political prestige. When European leaders accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on Dec. 10, Mr. Tusk, the prime minister, sat next to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the most powerful leader in Europe.

Poland remains a source of profit for companies in Western Europe that badly need them. “For us it’s really a bright spot in the European market,” said Anna Wiosna, manager of strategy development for the Polish unit of Hochtief, a German construction company that has upgraded Warsaw Chopin Airport, among other large projects.

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Connecticut school gunman shot mother multiple times, autopsy finds

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- School shooter Adam Lanza killed his mother with "multiple" shots to her head and killed himself with a single shot to his head, according to a coroner’s report released Sunday.

After killing his mother in the home they shared, Lanza, 20, drove her car to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he opened fire in two classrooms Friday morning, killing 20 children and six adults. He then turned the gun on himself.

The autopsy reports were released by Connecticut Chief Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, who said earlier that all the children had been shot multiple times.

Officials have not identified the make of Lanza's weapon, which Carver has described only as a “long gun.”

As the autopsy reports were being released Sunday, a threatening phone call to a local church prompted a mid-service evacuation that jarred a day of mourning as residents throughout this community grappled with the aftermath of the elementary school massacre.

FULL COVERAGE: Connecticut school shooting

A church spokesman said police gave an all-clear soon after the evacuation at St. Rose of Lima Church. A SWAT team had surrounded the rectory across the parking lot from the main church building and hundreds of parishioners were forced to leave services that had been packed all morning.

"This is a very difficult time for all the families. We have seen incredible dignity in the faces of these people," church spokesman Brian Wallace said. The church was locked following the all-clear to "restore calm," Wallace said.

"I don't think anyone can be surprised about anything after what has happened," he said.

Earlier police said in a morning briefing that they may have to interview the youngest survivors of the school shooting as they try to determine the motive of the gunman.

State Police Lt. Paul Vance and Newtown Police Lt. George Sinko offered few new details of the crime or the investigation into the so-far inexplicable rampage at the elementary school.

Any motive -- speculation about Lanza's video game habits, and his relationship with the school and with his mother -- remained unconfirmed. Two days later, police still aren't saying why he did what he did.

PHOTOS: Connecticut school shooting

“For us to be able to give you the summary of the motive, we have to complete the investigation; we have to have the whole picture to say how and why this occurred," said Vance of the Connecticut State Police, the lead agency on the investigation. "There are weeks’ worth of work left for us to complete this."

Lanza's mother legally purchased the guns later recovered at the scene of the massacre, law enforcement officials have said. Officials have previously said those weapons included a military-style Bushmaster .223 rifle, a Glock 9-millimeter pistol and a Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol, officials said.

Vance said police would be tracing the weapons' origins "back to their origin" at their manufacturers.

Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy told CNN on Sunday morning: "What we know is he shot his way into the building, so he penetrated the building -- he wasn't buzzed in. He penetrated the building by literally shooting an entrance into the building."

Sinko, meanwhile, said it was "too early" to say if children ever would return to the two classrooms where the killings occurred. "It's too early to say, but I would find it very difficult for them to do that," he said.

Arrangements were under way for some children to report to another elementary school in Newtown when classes resume.

"We want to keep these kids together," said Sinko, explaining that they hoped children who were moved to new schools could stay with their classmates. "We want to move forward very slowly and respectfully," he added, by way of explaining why it was expected to take so long to interview surviving children.

At the news conference, Vance also said the FBI had been asked to help investigate false postings on social media sites that included "some things in somewhat of a threatening manner," and some that purported to be messages from the shooter himself or others involved in the incident.

"There are quotes by people who are posing as the shooter.... Suffice it to say, the information has been deemed as threatening," he said when asked to elaborate.

ALSO:

Suspect in massacre tried to buy rifle days before, sources say

In Newtown, death's chill haunts the morning after school shooting

Connecticut shooting: Gunman forced his way into school, police say

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Painted Swan Nebula

Astronomers using data from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, have made an impressive composite of the nebula Messier 17, also known as the Omega Nebula or the Swan Nebula. The painting-like image shows vast clouds of gas and dust illuminated by the intense radiation from young stars.

The image shows a central region about 15 light-years across, although the entire nebula is even larger, about 40 light-years in total. Messier 17 is in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer), about 6000 light-years from Earth. It is a popular target for amateur astronomers, who can obtain good quality images using small telescopes.

These deep VLT observations were made at near-infrared wavelengths with the ISAAC instrument. The filters used were J (1.25 µm, shown in blue), H (1.6 µm, shown in green), and K (2.2 µm, shown in red). In the centre of the image is a cluster of massive young stars whose intense radiation makes the surrounding hydrogen gas glow. To the lower right of the cluster is a huge cloud of molecular gas. At visible wavelengths, dust grains in the cloud obscure our view, but by observing in infrared light, the glow of the hydrogen gas behind the cloud can be seen shining faintly through. Hidden in this region, which has a dark reddish appearance, the astronomers found the opaque silhouette of a disc of gas and dust. Although it is small in this image, the disc has a diameter of about 20 000 AU, dwarfing our Solar System (1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). It is thought that this disc is rotating and feeding material onto a central protostar — an early stage in the formation of a new star.

Image: ESO/R. Chini [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

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Jack Hanlon, actor in Our Gang films, dies in NV

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Jack Hanlon, who had roles in the 1926 silent classic “The General” and in two 1927 “Our Gang” comedies, died Thursday in Las Vegas at the age of 96.

His niece, Wendy Putnam Park of Las Vegas, says the precocious, freckle-faced Hanlon was a natural as a child actor from 1926 to 1933.

After a small role with Buster Keaton in “The General,” he played mischievous kids in two of Hal Roach’s “Our Gang/Little Rascals” films: “The Glorious Fourth” and “Olympic Games.”

Hanlon also played an orphan in the 1929 drama “The Shakedown,” and got an on-screen kiss from Greta Garbo in the 1930 film “Romance.”

After leaving Hollywood, Hanlon became a furniture mover and moved to Las Vegas in 1994.

Burial will be in Santa Monica, Calif.

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Mislabeled Foods Find Their Way to Diners’ Tables

ATLANTA — The menu offered fried catfish. But Freddie Washington, a pastor in Tuscaloosa, Ala., who sometimes eats out five nights a week and was raised on Gulf Coast seafood, was served tilapia.

Dustin Chambers for The New York Times

Consumers are misled most frequently when they buy fish, investigators say, because diners have such limited knowledge about seafood. 

It was a culinary bait and switch. Mr. Washington complained. The restaurant had run out of catfish, the manager explained, and the pastor left the restaurant with a free dinner, an apology and a couple of gift certificates.

“If I’m paying for a menu item,” Mr. Washington said, “I’m expecting that menu item to be placed before me.”

The subject of deceptive restaurant menus took on new life last week when Oceana, an international organization dedicated to ocean conservation, released a report with the headline “Widespread Seafood Fraud Found in New York City.”

Using genetic testing, the group found tilapia and tilefish posing as red snapper. Farmed salmon was sold as wild. Escolar, which can also legally be called oil fish, was disguised as white tuna, which is an unofficial nickname for albacore tuna.

Every one of 16 sushi bars investigated sold the researchers mislabeled fish. In all, 39 percent of the seafood from 81 grocery stores and restaurants was not what the establishment claimed it was.

“This thing with fish is age old, it’s been going on forever,” said Anne Quatrano, an Atlanta chef who opened Bacchanalia 20 years ago and kick-started the city’s sustainable food movement. “Unless you buy whole fish, you can’t always know what you’re getting from a supplier.”

Swapping one ingredient for a less expensive one extends beyond fish and is not always the fault of the person who sells food to the restaurant. Many a pork cutlet has headed to a table disguised as veal, and many an organic salad is not.

The term organic is regulated by the Department of Agriculture, but many other identifying words on a menu are essentially marketing terms. Unscrupulous chefs can falsely claim that a steak is Kobe beef or say a chicken was humanely treated without penalty.

In cases of blatant mislabeling, a chef or supplier often takes the bet that a local or federal agency charged with stopping deceptive practices is not likely to walk in the door. “This has been going on for as long as I’ve been cooking,” said Tom Colicchio, a New York chef and television personality. “When you start really getting into this stuff, there’s so many things people mislabel.”

At Mr. Colicchio’s New York restaurants, all but about 5 percent of the meat he serves is from animals raised without antibiotics, he said. It costs him about 30 percent more, so he charges more. “Yet I have a restaurant down the street that says they have organic chicken when they don’t, and they charge less money for it,” he said. “It’s all part of mislabeling and duping the public.”

Consumers are misled most frequently when they buy fish, investigators say, because there are so many fish in the sea and such limited knowledge among diners. The Food and Drug Administration lists 519 acceptable market names for fish, but more than 1,700 species are sold, said Morgan Liscinsky, a spokesman with the agency.

Marketing thousands of species in the ocean to a dining public who often has to be coaxed to move beyond the top five — shrimp, tuna, salmon, pollock and tilapia — is not an exact science.

The line between marketing something like Patagonian toothfish as Chilean sea bass or serving langostino and calling it lobster is a fine one.

Robert DeMasco, who owns Pierless Fish, a wholesaler in New York, used a profanity to describe someone who buys farm-raised fish and sells it as wild. “But on some of this, they’re splitting hairs,” he said.

In 2005, a customer sued Rubio’s, a West Coast taco chain, for misleading the public by selling a langostino lobster burrito. The FDA ruled that practice acceptable, which allowed chains like Long John Silver’s and Red Lobster to sell the crustacean called langostino and legally attach the word lobster to it. Maine lobstermen and lawmakers fought the decision unsuccessfully.

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China Plans on Continuity in Economic Policy in 2013

BEIJING — An annual conference that helps set economic policy in China ended with a lengthy government statement Sunday warning of difficulties in the global economy as well as industrial overcapacity and financial-sector risks at home.

But a review of the two-day conference’s activities, which was released by the official Xinhua news agency, suggested few changes in existing economic policies, calling for continuity for the time being.

The statement endorsed tax cuts, continued curbs on real estate speculation and a broader effort to increase domestic consumption and wean the economy from its dependence on exports and investment.

“The opportunities facing us are no longer the traditional ones of simply entering the international division of labor, expanding exports and accelerating investments, but rather new opportunities forcing us to expand domestic demand, improve innovative capacities and promoting the transformation of the mode of development,” the statement said.

Held in December each year, the Central Economic Work Conference in theory is jointly run by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and by the government’s cabinet of ministers. In reality, the Standing Committee of the Politburo has the power, and all seven of its members attended the conference, together with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who left the standing committee last month but remains in office as prime minister until the National People’s Congress next March.

While China has many economic opportunities, “we must soberly recognize that there are still many risks and challenges confronting our national development,” the overview released by Xinhua said. “Problems with imbalances, ill-coordination and lack of sustainability remain pronounced.”

“The contradiction between downward pressures on the economy and relative overcapacity in production is deepening,” the statement continued. “Business operating costs are rising while innovative capacities are inadequate. There are latent risks in the financial sphere.”

Previous annual conferences have lasted three days. The government issued no explanation of why the conference this year appeared to last only two days, opening Saturday and closing Sunday.

The conference called for the agricultural sector to pay attention to maintaining an adequate food supply for the population, and endorsed continued urbanization, a favorite theme of the incoming prime minister next March, Li Keqiang.

“Urbanization is a historic task of our country’s modernization, and also possesses the greatest potential for expanding domestic consumption,” the statement said.

The statement called for continued but unspecified industrial reforms to address the problem of overcapacity. It was not clear what would be done to address risks in the financial sector, but a government official had said before the conference that China’s leaders were eager to move toward the introduction of a system of bank deposit insurance.

The precise details of discussions at Central Economic Work Conferences sometimes take days or weeks to dribble out.

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L.A. County D.A. reassigns rival she beat in November election

Two weeks after taking office, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey has reassigned a political rival she beat in the November election from a prestigious high-profile job to a post where he will no longer try cases — a move he contends is a backward step for his career.

In his new post, Alan Jackson will supervise deputy district attorneys handling what he described as "garden variety felony" and misdemeanor cases rather than the complex, high-profile murder cases he directed and tried for years in the office's elite major crimes division.

The reassignment comes despite Lacey's describing Jackson during and after the election as an "outstanding trial attorney." A nearly 18-year veteran of the office, Jackson was named as "prosecutor of the year" in 2010 by the county's bar association.

He was one of two prosecutors who won the conviction of famed music producer Phil Spector in 2009, marking the office's first victory in a celebrity murder trial in more than 40 years. He also won a conviction in the cold case murders of motor racing legend Mickey Thompson and his wife. Among his current workload was the capital murder case of a former Armenian army soldier accused of killing an 8-year-old girl, her mother and father, and a prostitute.

An office spokeswoman described Jackson's transfer as a "lateral move" that had nothing to do with the campaign. Jean Guccione said more than half of the office's managers were reassigned on Friday as part of a shake-up by the new administration. Jackson's salary, title and office location in downtown Los Angeles will remain the same, she said.

"This is not retaliation," Guccione said. "This new assignment provides an excellent opportunity for him to share his courtroom experience with other prosecutors."

Jackson, however, disputed that the transfer was a lateral move.

"It's a move backward in my career," Jackson said. "This decision is specifically designed to remove me from the courtroom and from access to complex and high-profile litigation."

Jackson stopped short of saying he believed the new assignment, which takes effect Jan. 7, was punishment for his criticism of Lacey during the campaign, but he said he could think of no other reason for the transfer.

"The only thing that has changed from the time I have been trying these cases ... is that I ran for office against her," he said. "Am I disappointed? Absolutely. Not just for me, but I'm disappointed for what it says about the mission of the district attorney's office."

Lacey, a registered Democrat who had the backing of incumbent Steve Cooley, beat Jackson, a registered Republican, in the Nov. 6 runoff by 55% to 45%. The nonpartisan campaign grew testy at times, with Jackson running a television commercial in which he referred to conflicting testimony Lacey gave at employee grievance hearings and accused her of being "dishonest under oath to protect her boss," Cooley.

After the election, Lacey acknowledged that she had felt hurt by the accusation but again called Jackson "a very talented trial lawyer" and promised that she would not retaliate against him.

"I'm not a vindictive person. I'm not a mean person. I don't believe in wasting energy on that kind of thing," she told The Times during an interview two weeks ago. "If he chooses to remain in the office, we will find an appropriate spot."

Lacey, however, did not say that Jackson would remain in the high-profile major crimes division, where he has worked for nearly a decade and most recently served as assistant head deputy.

"The choice won't be up to him. It will be up to us," she said. "I think in this office, you benefit from a variety of assignments."

Jackson on Saturday said he had not decided whether he would remain with the district attorney's office for the long term but added that he would work hard in his new assignment.

jack.leonard@latimes.com

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Stunning Views of Glaciers Seen From Space

To a geologist, glaciers are among the most exciting features on Earth. Though they seem to creep along at impossibly slow speeds, in geologic time glaciers are relatively fast, powerful landscape artists that can carve out valleys and fjords in just a few thousand years.

Glaciers also provide an environmental record by trapping air bubbles in ice that reveal atmospheric conditions in the past. And because they are very sensitive to climate, growing and advancing when it’s cold and shrinking and retreating when its warm, they can be used as proxies for regional temperatures.

Over geologic time, they have ebbed and flowed with natural climate cycles. Today, the world’s glaciers are in retreat, sped up by relatively rapid warming of the globe. In our own Glacier National Park in Montana, only 26 named glaciers remain out of the 150 known in 1850. They are predicted to be completely gone by 2030 if current warming continues at the same rate.

Here we have collected 13 stunning images of some of the world’s most impressive and beautiful glaciers, captured from space by astronauts and satellites.

Above: Bear Glacier, Alaska

This image taken in 2005 of Bear Glacier highlights the beautiful color of many glacial lakes. The hue is caused by the silt that is finely ground away from the valley walls by the glacier and deposited in the lake. The particles in this “glacial flour” can be very reflective, turning the water into a distinctive greenish blue. The lake, eight miles up from the terminus of the glacier, was held in place by the glacier, but in 2008 it broke through and drained into Resurrection Bay in Kenai Fjords National Park.

The grey stripe down the middle of the glacier is called a medial moraine. It is formed when two glaciers flow into each other and join on their way downhill. When glaciers come together, their lateral moraines, long ridges formed along their edges as the freeze-thaw cycle of the glacier breaks off chunks of rock from the surrounding walls, meet to form a rocky ridge along the center of the joined glaciers.

Image: GeoEye/NASA, 2005.

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