Melting Ice
This week’s acrostic resonates with us on a personal level, even more than most of our puzzles. For the past couple of decades, Dave’s “day jobs” – both inside and outside of the U.S. Government – have involved the Arctic Region. The photo above, taken in 2015, shows him chairing a meeting of the Arctic Council, a group of the eight nations with territory above the Arctic Circle. (In case you’re wondering, that little lion sitting in front of Dave is Ponce de Leon, intrepid adventurer and traveling companion.)
In 2019, Jane’s orchestra premiered a symphonic work entitled “Arctica,” composed by Lera Auerbach and commissioned by the National Geographic Society, partly to call attention to the profound challenges presented by a changing climate. In fact, the Arctic is warming three to four times faster on average than the planet as a whole, depending on the metrics used.
Elizabeth Kolbert’s quote at the heart of this acrostic, which appeared in an article in The New Yorker in 2024, dramatically captures one of the many risks posed by unchecked climate change: rising sea levels that could swamp low-lying areas around the world. Her article points out that there is still time to avoid the worst-case scenarios, provided we act quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
As always, we sought to include as many clues and answers as possible that connect to the puzzle’s theme. How many did you spot?
As for a video offering, we thought about cueing up time-lapse images of the melting Arctic sea ice. If you would like to see such a thing, you can find it on YouTube; search for the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Instead, inspired by Answer M., we chose something more light-hearted: Linda Ronstadt singing a classic song originally released by Martha and the Vandellas: