Clear and sunny this afternoon on California’s north coast — a mild-kind of chilly, though, which ain’t too bad.

Nature is too weird even for smart people: When I heard about the aquifer, I had almost the same reaction as when we discovered Lake Vostok [in Antarctica]: it blew my mind that something like that is possible,” said Michael Studinger, project scientist for Operation IceBridge, a NASA airborne campaign studying changes in ice at the poles.

A mind-blower even for a brainiac.

(Illustration: MC Escher’s ‘Reptiles‘ found here).

And the discovery was a near-accident — via ScienceCodex:

A team of glaciologists serendipitously found the aquifer while drilling in southeast Greenland in 2011 to study snow accumulation.
Two of their ice cores were dripping water when the scientists lifted them to the surface, despite air temperatures of minus 4 F (minus 20 C).
The researchers later used NASA’s Operation Icebridge radar data to confine the limits of the water reservoir, which spreads over 27,000 square miles (69,930 square km) — an area larger than the state of West Virginia.
The water in the aquifer has the potential to raise global sea level by 0.016 inches (0.4 mm).

There’s more than 100 billion tons of liquid water from 15 to 160 feet below ground. Even with all kinds of technology and tons of science, how this planet works is still a mystery: “We thought we had an understanding of how things work in Greenland, but here is this entire storage system of water we didn’t realize was there,” said Richard Forster, lead study author and a glaciologist at the University of Utah.
And there’s a lot of other shit we don’t know with a slant toward the worse side.

In the mix of climate change, there’s a sense of uncertainty in some of the science in speed of approach — nicely spaced apart every few weeks or so, a science environmental study is released, and an almost-disclaimer on many (if not all) is whatever the research is about — polar ice melting, trees dying, deadly mosquitos migrating, or a myriad of other subjects — seems to have increased, or is happening faster that anticipated.
Now a discovery of a huge lake no one knew even existed.
Even with the shit getting more and more obvious every day, there’s a crazed-maniacal group attempting to commit humanocide with an emphasis on all of humanity — from the Guardian last Friday:

Conservative groups may have spent up to $1bn a year on the effort to deny science and oppose action on climate change, according to the first extensive study into the anatomy of the anti-climate effort.
The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks.
They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change.
Such financial support has hardened conservative opposition to climate policy, ultimately dooming any chances of action from Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, the study found.
“I call it the climate-change counter movement,” said the author of the study, Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle.
“It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this. This is a large-scale political effort.”

Really biazzre the slithering effect greed has on mankind.