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A massive hole the size of Lake Superior has opened in the ice that covers Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, a phenomenon that hasn’t been seen since the mid-1970s. This hole, called a polynya, opens up 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) of ocean in the middle of the Weddell Sea’s ice pack, hundreds of miles from shore. "This is hundreds of kilometers from the ice edge. If we didn’t have a satellite, we wouldn’t know it was there," explains professor Kent Moore, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto.
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If the news of a major hurricane tearing for the coast of Ireland seems odd, as was the case for Hurricane Ophelia, that’s because the phenomenon of hurricanes surviving as organized storms that far east in the Atlantic Ocean is extremely rare. As it is, Ophelia now holds the record for the easternmost major hurricane in the Atlantic, and if it had maintained its strength it would have been only the third known tropical storm to make landfall in Europe, following 2005’s Hurricane Vince, making landfall in Spain, and Hurricane Debbie, brushing the west coast of Ireland in 1961.
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Small miscalculations create great wars, and the law of unintended consequences governs the way the unfold and how they end. In June of 1914 when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, nobody imagined that the greatest war know to that time would be triggered as a result, and that it would destroy an orderly world and lead to another eighty years of upheaval. Similarly, when Dean Acheson made a policy speech in 1950 that failed to mention that Korea was considered an ally by the US, nobody realized that North Korea would then start the horrific Korean war that has led to the situation we face today, with the possibility that a hot war could break out at any time.
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