Ice Shelf Collapsing (Reading Assignment, Week 9)

These four articles: “Giant Antarctic ice shelf breaks into the sea,” by Claire Truscott; “Earth in Flux: An Antarctic Ice shelf Crumbles,” by Andrew C. Revkin; “Bye-bye, Antarctica?” by Andrew Leonard; and, “Antarctic ice shelf ‘hanging by a thread,’” by Catherine Brahic, are all written for a very general audience to become informed in a very generalized way about the recent collapse of a large portion of ice from the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, in Antarctica, as well as the possibility of the entire ice shelf collapsing in the near future. In all of the articles the authors seem to be voicing their claims in a more or less pro-environmentalist voice without much mention of the opposition. The only exception to this would be “Bye-bye, Antarctica?” by Andrew Leonard, in which he opens the article with, “I seized upon the news about the crumbling Wilkins shelf, a 5,000-square-mile chunk of ice that is part of the Antarctic Peninsula, as an opportunity to find out how the skeptics were spinning the news” (2008). However, even Leonard swung the article back around to a seemingly pro-environmentalist stance by the end.
Overall the articles are all fairly similar with the exception of one, which is the “Bye-bye, Antarctica.” The rest of the articles all have a fairly simplistic view that global warming is causing the ice of Antarctica to melt quickly. However, “Bye-bye, Antarctica” talks at first about the opposition’s viewpoint and then entwines the fact that after researching the opposition’s viewpoint, Leonard could, “…invariably connect the dots back to Exxon [the oil company]” (2008).
Once again, with the exception of one article, they were all similarly structured and contained more or less the same content. However, the way that the article, “Bye-bye, Antarctica?” went about expressing the view in a creative way definitely led to that particular article sticking out from the rest.

Truscott, C. (2008, March 26). Giant Antarctic ice shelf breaks into the sea. The Guardian. Retrieved March 30, 2008, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/26/poles.antarctica/print

Revkin, A.C. (2008, March 25). Earth in Flux: An Antarctic Ice Shelf Crumbles. The New York Times [Electronic Version]. Retrieved March 30, 2008, from http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/earth-in-flux-the-antarctic-ice-shelf-crumbles/index.html?ex=1364270400&en=0e55436afb96d0d2&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Brahic, C. (2008, March 25). Antarctic ice shelf ‘hanging by a thread.’ New Scientist. Retrieved March 30, 2008, from http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn13530-antarctic-ice-shelf-hanging-by-a-thread.html

Leonard, A. (2008, March 26). Bye-bye, Antarctica? How the World Works. Retrieved March 30, 2008, from http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/03/26/antarctic_ice_shelf/index.html