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This Week at The Great Gray Bridge

In the past week at this blog, I’ve written about the best TV ad of the presidential campaign thus far; a brave woman in Alaska who fended off an aggressive grizzly bear; the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema of Austin, TX, which is entering the NYC market only a couple blocks from my office; the great Canadian band Library Voices; Sarah Silverman’s bawdy video that pokes fun at right-wing casino magnate Sheldon Adelson; a new album from Bob Dylan; the award-winning CBC radio host, Jian Ghomeshi; Greenland’s worryingly shrinking Petermann Glacier; a young chess master and Franconia College classmate of mine who vanished in 1978 under mysterious circumstances; the late, great baseball writer, Robert Creamer, who chronicled the life of Babe Ruth; the sweet severance deal Mitt Romney arranged for himself from Bain Capital; the moving book I’ve been reading by Rob Sheffield, my #FridayReads yesterday; and my own personal history, including the story of how during a teenage road trip my brother Joel and I happened to adopt our longtime black lab Noah, pictured here with me.

Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, Calving or Caving?

An AP story carried on NPR’s site reports that an enormous piece of the Petermann Glacier in Greenland, a chunk of ice twice the size of Manhattan, has fallen into the sea surrounding that far northern continent. While glaciologists can’t yet say for sure this was caused by climate change, it is of a piece with recent melting that’s been occurring all around the massive landmass. A series of maps and satellite photos from NASA shows these changes, which actually occurred in August 2010, though examination of the photos has only recently yielded discovery of the event. Scientists will continue to study this event, as they try to determine if this was a glacier calving off a large part of itself, or whether the 46-square mile chunk of ice caved in to the ocean as a result of global warming.