I am indebted to Dr. Min D. Rowse of the University of Anchorage for her invaluable help with my most recent work. As suggested by anecdotal evidence of the increasingly tiny pieces of glacial ice harvested from Prince William Sound (above), climate change is rapidly redefining Alaska’s weather, biospheres, and even geography at a measurable rate not seen since the Cryogenian period. (I may not reproduce Min’s text until it has passed peer review and been published in the scientific journal, International Climate Gleanings.)

About the captions: each melting, ISO-2110, forty-milliliter ice cube is described in Westerbook units. The system, devised by legendary physicist Xavier Westerbook, factors the ice cube’s exposure time—as well as air temperature, surface temperature, wind speed, humidity, barometric pressure, cloud cover, and solar radiation—to come up with a standard unit of measurement.