My flight yesterday from Minneapolis to Santiago got held up for de-icing.  Being so near to the year-end solstice, the change in seasons from Minnesota to Chile could not be more dramatic—a swing of 45 degrees in solar angle relative to the ecliptic plan.  So it’s out of snow (storming today back home) and into 80+ degrees and pure sun. : )

Things are wackier than I’d thought in regard to where one might expect to find ice nowadays.  For example, who would have thought that water could freeze on Mercury?  But that’s what NASA recently reported based on a shout out from their spacecraft Messenger, which detected polar hydrogen via neutron spectroscopy.  See the details here.  I enjoyed the quip by Sean C. Solomon, the principal investigator for Messenger, about there being enough ice to encase Washington, D.C., in a frozen block two and a half miles deep.*  That might be what’s needed to cool down all the rhetoric about the fiscal cliff.  😉

Meanwhile the worries about the warming climate melting Earth’s icecaps just keep coming on.  Concerned about contrails contributing to the greenhouse effect, the Washington Post is now demanding the Santa’s sleigh be grounded.  Read this 12/4/12 blog and weep. : (

*On Closest Planet to the Sun, NASA Finds Lots of Ice, 11/29/12