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    NASA’S Lunar Trailblazer Hitches Ride to the Moon to Map Water for Astronauts

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    Lunar Trailblazer, an orbiter that shared a launch on Wednesday with the commercial Athena lander, will help scientists understand where the moon’s water is, and what form it takes.The moon is not bone dry, scientists now know. But how many drops of water will thirsty astronauts find? No one knows for sure.A robotic NASA spacecraft called Lunar Trailblazer, which launched Wednesday night from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is aiming to provide a detailed map from orbit of the abundance, distribution and form of water across the moon.Lunar Trailblazer tagged along for the ride to space on the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as Athena, a commercial lunar lander built by Intuitive Machines of Houston, which will deploy a NASA instrument to drill in the moon and sniff for water vapors.Athena will study one spot on the moon. Lunar Trailblazer will provide a global picture of water on the moon.“That’s another exciting thing for us as we get more science into space with one launch,” Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate, said during a news conference before the launch.Less than an hour after liftoff, Lunar Trailblazer and Athena went their separate ways. Athena is taking a direct path to the moon, with landing scheduled for March 6, while Lunar Trailblazer set off on a meandering but fuel-efficient journey that will take four months to reach its destination. After it enters orbit, the spacecraft will make observations for at least two years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Expect an Icy Commute for Parts of the Northeast on Monday Morning

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      Light snow and freezing rain are expected in parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania starting Sunday night and could make for a hazardous commute on Monday, forecasters said.A light snowfall and some sleet that will begin on Sunday evening in parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania are expected to make roads icy for Monday morning commuters.The National Weather Service issued a winter weather advisory, in effect until 10 a.m. Monday for parts of northeastern Pennsylvania and until 11 a.m. for parts of New Jersey, as well as the Lower Hudson Valley in New York.Parts of Connecticut are also expected to be affected, including northern areas of Fairfield, New Haven and northern Middlesex Counties.In northeastern Pennsylvania, forecasters predict up to four inches of snow and sleet, which will turn into a light glaze of ice accumulation Monday morning. Most parts of New York and New Jersey will get less than an inch of snow starting on Sunday evening, spreading eastward into southwestern Connecticut overnight.By late Sunday night, the snow is expected to transition to freezing rain, creating hazardous, icy conditions, particularly on untreated roads and in higher elevations. The morning commute on Monday could be especially dangerous, with icy roads posing significant challenges for drivers, forecasters said.Ice accumulations are forecast to range from a light glaze to a few hundredths of an inch across most areas, while western Orange County may get up to an inch of ice. Higher elevations in the Poconos of Pennsylvania will get the heaviest snow and ice accumulations on Sunday evening, potentially up to four inches.Mike Kistner, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Binghamton, N.Y., said the forecast for freezing rain and ice is what pushed the Lower Hudson Valley and parts of New Jersey to be under a winter weather advisory, though the snowfall should be light.While the cold air and below-freezing temperatures Monday morning will likely keep roads icy during the morning rush, Mr. Kistner said as it heats up later in the morning and throughout the day, conditions should clear. Bridges and overpasses may remain icy even if the main roads are wet, he added.Jennifer Givner, a spokeswoman for the New York State Thruway Authority, said workers were ready to clear the roads and have pretreated them for freezing rain, though she warned drivers to take it easy on Monday morning.“Give yourself some extra time in the morning,” Ms. Givner said. “And just slow down. I think that’s always the best way to travel in this weather.”Winter weather advisories were also issued for areas in western Maryland, western Virginia, and eastern West Virginia, which could get up to two inches of snow and sleet.The Weather Service warned about slippery roads in those areas. Those advisories were in place until 1 a.m. on Monday.In West Virginia, northwestern Pocahontas County and southeastern Randolph County were under winter storm warnings until 1 a.m. on Monday as strong winds, snow and ice moved in Sunday night. More

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      Baltazar Ushca, Who Kept Andean Ice Harvesting Alive, Dies at 80

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      He trekked up Ecuador’s tallest mountain twice a week for six decades to hack ice off a glacier with a pickax. He is believed to have been the last of his breed.For 60 years, Baltazar Ushca worked a rare but rigorous trade: ice merchant. Once or twice a week, he climbed snow-capped Mount Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest peak, to hack ice from a glacier with a pickax, wrap the 60-pound blocks in hay and transport them on the backs of his donkeys. He would then sell them to villagers who did not have electricity and needed refrigeration to conserve their food.It started as a family business. Mr. Ushca’s father, Juan, was an ice merchant, as were his brothers, Juan and Gregorio, and they made their very modest livings off the Chimborazo ice.But Mr. Ushca, who was 4-foot-11, chipped at the ice decades after modern refrigeration came to his village, by which time his job was nearly obsolete. He gradually became known as the last of his breed, selling his blocks of ice for a few dollars each largely to vendors in a market in Riobamba, Ecuador, for use in fruit drinks and making ice cream.“The natural ice from Chimborazo is the best ice,” Mr. Ushca said in a short documentary, “El Último Hielero,” or “The Last Ice Merchant” (2012), directed by Sandy Patch. “The tastiest and the sweetest. Full of vitamins for your bones.”Once he reached the market, he delivered the blocks of ice by carrying them on his back.“My kids would say, ‘Why suffering so much?’” Gregorio Ushca said the documentary. “‘Being so cold, walking far, if you almost make no money?’”Since he was 15, Baltazar Ushca has harvested the glacial ice of Ecuador’s Mount Chimborazo. His brothers have long since retired. “El Último Hielero” is a story of cultural change and adaption.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ruth Glacier in Alaska Hides America’s Deepest Gorge

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      As his bush plane circled the craggy peaks of the Alaska Range, the explorer Bradford Washburn peered down and had a burning thought.Coursing down the southern slopes of Denali and Mount Silverthrone were the accumulated snows of thousands of winters, compacted under their own weight into colossal rivers of ice that filled the valleys for miles in every direction. At one particular spot in the white wilderness, Washburn noticed from above, all this glacial mass was somehow squeezing through a granite-walled corridor just a mile wide.Washburn became convinced, he wrote, that beneath the ice lay a secret: The corridor was deep. Deeper, perhaps, than any other gorge on the continent, and maybe even the planet.That was 1937. Nearly 90 years later, a team of scientists set off into the windswept mountains to measure the glacier with snowmobiles and ice-penetrating radar. It wasn’t easy: The Great North does not surrender its mysteries readily. The researchers almost didn’t think they’d found anything of interest.The Ruth Glacier originates beneath the summit of Denali and flows through deep granite valleys.Now, thanks to some clever analysis, and a bit of luck, they have put forth the most conclusive evidence yet that Washburn was right — that the area could be the deepest gorge in North America.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Close Are the Planet’s Climate Tipping Points?

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      Right now, every moment of every day, we humans are reconfiguring Earth’s climate bit by bit. Hotter summers and wetter storms. Higher seas and fiercer wildfires. The steady, upward turn of the dial on a host of threats to our homes, our societies and the environment around us. We might also be changing the climate […] More

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      Alaska’s Juneau Ice Field Is Melting at an ‘Incredibly Worrying’ Pace, Scientists Say

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      The speed of decline in the Juneau Ice Field, an expanse of 1,050 interconnected glaciers, has doubled in recent decades, scientists discovered.One of North America’s largest areas of interconnected glaciers is melting twice as quickly as it did before 2010, a team of scientists said Tuesday, in what they called an “incredibly worrying” sign that land ice in many places could disappear even sooner than previously thought.The Juneau Ice Field, which sprawls across the Coast Mountains of Alaska and British Columbia, lost 1.4 cubic miles of ice a year between 2010 and 2020, the researchers estimated. That’s a sharp acceleration from the decades before, and even sharper when compared with the mid-20th century or earlier, the scientists said. All told, the ice field has shed a quarter of its volume since the late 18th century, which was part of a period of glacial expansion known as the Little Ice Age.As societies add more and more planet-warming carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, glaciers in many areas could cross tipping points beyond which their melting speeds up rapidly, said Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at Newcastle University in England who led the new research.“If we reduce carbon, then we have more hope of retaining these wonderful ice masses,” Dr. Davies said. “The more carbon we put in, the more we risk irreversible, complete removal of them.”The scientists’ findings were published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.The fate of Alaska’s ice matters tremendously for the world. In no other region of the planet are melting glaciers predicted to contribute more to global sea-level rise this century.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A ‘Corpsicle’ Came Back to Life on ‘True Detective.’ Is That Possible?

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      An incident involving a group of frozen bodies on the fourth season of the HBO series has raised some scientific questions.The men lay frozen naked in a ghoulish pile, with mouths agape and eyes glazed over, their hair encrusted with ice and snow. They were all dead — or so the investigators on the HBO series “True Detective: Night Country” thought.Frozen bodies are a familiar problem in this fictional Alaska town near the Arctic Circle, but this giant “corpsicle” is unusual. And so is what happens at the end of the episode, which aired last Sunday: one of the men wakes up when his arm is accidentally snapped off by an officer.The resurrection has sparked grisly speculation among some fans: How can a person be living, a viewer on Reddit asked, if that person’s limbs are so frozen? “They could have been flash frozen in a moment of terror” at the moment of their deaths, another speculated. Many were skeptical that the human body could survive such an ordeal and wondered if the show was straying into the supernatural.Doctors say that it is impossible for a completely frozen person to make a recovery. But it is possible for someone who appears frozen — limbs stiff, skin cold and hard, and without a pulse or breath — to be resuscitated, depending on how long the person has been out in the cold.“If all the tissue in your body is ice, or has ice in it, then you’re not coming back,” said Ken Zafren, a physician and a professor of emergency medicine at Stanford University, who also works in Alaska. But, he added, “I’ve seen plenty of cases in which the person really looked dead, and could come back.”During hypothermia, an adult’s body temperature can cool well below the normal average of 98.6 degrees, Dr. Zafren said. A person’s pulse and breathing slow significantly, reducing the body’s need for oxygen. Eventually, the person may go into cardiac arrest, stopping the pulse and breathing altogether. But because the brain is cold, the lack of oxygen takes longer to cause damage, he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More