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A Minnesota company called Ideal Conceal has invented a gun that folds to look like a cellphone. It's expected to go on sale next year for $395.

"Looks like a cellphone when folded up, but push the safety and you are ready to defend yourself" - that's how Ideal Conceal describes the gun concept, which is still pending a patent.

According Guns.com, the gun is a .380 derringer that holds two bullets. The prototype is expected in May.

A Minnesota company called Ideal Conceal has invented a gun that folds to look like a cellphone. It's expected to go on sale next year for $395. (Photo via Ideal Conceal's Facebook page)


Here's the description of the gun from the company's website:

Carry with confidence, conceal in style. The best gun is always the one you have with you. In today's day and age, carrying a concealed pistol has become a necessity. But what if you didn't have to conceal?


That's where Ideal Conceal comes in. Smartphones are EVERYWHERE, so your new pistol will easily blend in with today's environment. In its locked position it will be virtually undetectable because it hides in plain sight.


Inventor Kirk Kjellberg told NBC News the idea came to him after he attracted attention for carrying a concealed weapon in a restaurant so he made a gun that wouldn't stand out.

He told NBC the Ideal Conceal gun is the same size as his Galaxy S7 phone with a protective case on it: About 3 inches by 5 inches.

The company's Facebook page has been responding to criticism that this gun will lead to more police shootings because of confusions about whether it is a gun or a phone. Here's one response the company posted March 9:







WHEN I read these crazy posts about how people will now be more likely to be shot for either "reaching for their phone"...

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has long been envisioned as a foundation stone for stability, security, and increased prosperity in Asia. But with uncertainty plaguing the political systems of Myanmar, Malaysia, and Thailand, ASEAN may be entering a period of policy and diplomatic inertia. At a time when China’s economic downturn and unilateral territorial claims are posing serious challenges to the region, ASEAN’s weakness could prove highly dangerous.

The problems that are now bedeviling Myanmar, Malaysia, and Thailand may appear to have little in common. But they all spring from the same source: An entrenched elite’s stubborn refusal to craft a viable system of governance that recognises new and rising segments of society and reflects their interests in government policy.

And yet, despite the shared roots of these countries’ political dysfunction, their prospects vary. Surprisingly, hope is strongest in Myanmar, where the military junta recognised the need for change, exemplified in the 2010 decision to free the long-imprisoned Nobel Peace laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and embark on a transition to democracy.

Myanmar’s former military leaders, it seems, looked ahead dispassionately and saw a stark choice: Either relinquish gradually their absolute power, allowing for a democratic transition, or permit China to tighten its grip on their country. China’s efforts to impose development plans that would deliver few, if any, benefits to Myanmar made the choice somewhat easier.

Today, Suu Kyi is Burma’s paramount leader. Though the constitution imposed by the junta prevents her from serving officially as president, she holds the real power in the current government led by her National League for Democracy, which secured a landslide victory in last year’s general election.

Of course, there is no guarantee that Myanmars democratic transition will succeed; after all, beyond barring Suu Kyi from the presidency, the junta’s constitution reserves all of the "power" cabinet posts for the military. But with Suu Kyi carefully establishing the NLD’s authority, and with friends in India, Japan, and the United States monitoring any potential backsliding, there is a legitimate hope that most of the members of Myanmar’s military elite will continue to reconcile themselves, if begrudgingly, to modern democracy, just as Eastern Europe’s former communist rulers once did.

The situations in Malaysia and Thailand are less promising. Extreme political polarisation is almost as deeply entrenched in these countries today as it was in Myanmar before 2010. But whereas Myanmar’s generals recognised the need to escape their cul-de-sac, the Malay and Thai elites seem to be doubling down on political exclusion.

In Malaysia, the problem is rooted in ethnic and racial divisions. Since gaining independence, Malaysia’s leaders have pursued policies that favoured the indigenous Malay majority, at the expense of the country’s minorities, most notably the sizable Chinese and Indian populations.

But throughout Malaysia’s first decades of independence, the United Malays National Organisation, the country’s largest political party, did seek to incorporate minority interests, despite commanding the loyalty of the vast majority of the electorate. This inclusive approach began to break down with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, when a coalition of political parties was forged by former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim – who was subsequently jailed on contrived charges – to challenge the UMNO’s authority. With Prime Minister Najib Razak and his government now enmeshed in a vast corruption scandal, the UNMO is relying more than ever on Malay chauvinism.

In Thailand, the source of deep political polarisation is economic. Simply put, the “haves” want to keep the “have-nots” from having a voice.

For much of Thai history, the elite’s rule was untroubled. But the enactment in 1997 of what came to be known as the “People’s Constitution” enabled previously discounted political forces to rise. None rose faster or higher than the business tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra, who exploited the resentments of the long-disempowered rural poor to forge a mighty political machine that challenged the entrenched royalist political establishment, which includes the monarchy, the military, the judiciary, and the civil service.

The clash between the two factions led to two military coups, one in 2006 to push Shinawatra out of power and another in 2014 to drive out his younger sister, Yingluck Shinawatra. The conflict became increasingly violent, with both sides willing to go to great lengths to maintain their grip on power.

Today, the ruling military junta is systematically cracking down on dissent; it has banned Thaksin-aligned politicians from entering politics, and is trying to impose a new constitution. And Thailand’s troubles may be about to worsen: With King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s health failing, his seven-decade reign may be near its end. Should the royal succession be contested, Thailand could enter yet another period of chaos and violence.

Just as India, Japan, and the US have been helping to shepherd Myanmar through its transition, they should take a more proactive role in saving Malaysia and Thailand from their elites’ self-destructive behaviour. Standing idly by while two of ASEAN’s core members consume themselves is simply not a viable option. - Project Syndicate



SOURCES: TIMES OF OMAN

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I Am The Captain Of My Soul .. !
--- Nelson Mandela ..

Israel urged its citizens in Turkey on Monday to leave “as soon as possible” in an upgraded travel advisory predicting possible follow-up attacks to the March 19 suicide bombing in Istanbul blamed on Islamic State.

Three Israeli tourists and an Iranian were killed in the Istanbul attack, which prompted the counter-terrorism bureau in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to issue a generalised “level 3” warning against travel to Turkey.

A statement by the bureau raised this to “level 2” on Monday, signifying what it called a “high concrete threat” that Islamic State or similar groups would attack Turkish tourist attractions. It did not elaborate on what prompted the alert.

The statement said Israelis should avoid going to Turkey and, if already there, “depart as soon as possible”.

If a “level 1” alert were to be issued by Israel, that would urge citizens to leave the country “forthwith”.


HINDUSTAN TIMES

__________________
I Am The Captain Of My Soul .. !
--- Nelson Mandela ..

Suspended Gurdaspur superintendent of police Salwinder Singh on Thursday arrived at the NIA headquarters in Delhi to be questioned by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) from Pakistan on the Pathankot terror attack.

Singh, his cook Madan Gopal and friend Rajesh Verma reached the NIA office where the JIT will question the three in the presence of National Investigation Agency (NIA) officials, sources told IANS.

The three were questioned by the NIA on March 26 and have been living under the agency’s supervision since then.

Singh has claimed that he, Verma and cook Gopal were abducted by four or five heavily-armed terrorists near Punjab’s Kolia village on January 2.

The terrorists later attacked the Pathankot airbase in which seven security personnel were killed. The Pakistani terrorists were later killed in a shootout.

The Pakistani team is in India to probe the Pathankot attack, which New Delhi says was masterminded by Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Maulana Masood Azhar.

On Monday and Tuesday, the NIA submitted evidence to the five-member JIT on the terror attack.

According to NIA sources, the evidence show that the Pathankot operation was planned by elements in Pakistan.

The visiting team comprises among others Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) official Lt. Colonel Tanvir Ahmed and military intelligence officer Lt. Colonel Irfan Mirza.


HINDUSTAN TIMES

__________________
I Am The Captain Of My Soul .. !
--- Nelson Mandela ..

The first inflatable space home will be launched on Friday, 8 April.


The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or Beam for short, is headed for the International Space Station.

It looks like a giant pillow and, when fully inflated in space, it will be large enough to hold a car.

Astronauts will test the module, which is designed by Nasa and Bigelow Aerospace, for two years to see how it holds up.

For video visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/35935562

BBC..

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I Am The Captain Of My Soul .. !
--- Nelson Mandela ..

WASHINGTON — President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China said Thursday that they would sign the Paris Agreement on climate change on April 22, the first day the United Nations accord will be open for government signatures.

Officials cast the announcement as a statement of joint resolve by the world’s two largest greenhouse gas polluters, even though there are doubts about whether the United States can meet its obligations under the agreement.

In February, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked an Obama administration regulation to curb greenhouse gas pollution from power plants, the centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy and the major way for the administration to meet its targets under the Paris accord.

The two world leaders made the announcement on the sidelines of a nuclear security meeting in Washington.

“Our cooperation and our joint statements were critical in arriving at the Paris agreement, and our two countries have agreed that we will not only sign the agreement on the first day possible, but we’re committing to formally join it as soon as possible this year,” Mr. Obama told reporters at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, where he was meeting with Mr. Xi at the nuclear gathering.



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Mr. Obama, who spoke across a table from Mr. Xi, added, “And we urge other countries to do the same.”

Mr. Xi, speaking through an interpreter, said, “As the two biggest economies, China and the U.S. have a responsibility to work together.”


THE NY TIMES!

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I Am The Captain Of My Soul .. !
--- Nelson Mandela ..

North Korea fired a surface-to-air missile into waters off its east coast facing Japan, in the latest show of defiance while global leaders were meeting in Washington for the Nuclear Security Summit.

A short-range missile was fired at around 12:45 p.m. Friday from South Hamgyong Province in the country’s northeastern area, a spokesman at South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said by phone. South Korea’s military is closely monitoring the situation and is prepared for any provocation from the North, the spokesman said.

The regime in Pyongyang has launched a series of ballistic missiles in recent weeks, including one that flew 800 kilometers on March 18, in a protest against growing international pressure and against ongoing joint South Korea-U.S. military exercises.




South Korean President Park Geun Hye met with U.S. President Barack Obama and with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss cooperation in the face of rising prospects of a nuclear threat from North Korea. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un pledged to continue to test nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, the country’s official media reported March 15


SOURCES : BLOOMBERG

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I Am The Captain Of My Soul .. !
--- Nelson Mandela ..

A new NASA study has revealed that the mass gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.

Increase in Antarctic snow is greater than losses: NASA

The new study showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.

Lead author Jay Zwally of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center believes that it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse.

For the research, Zwally and his team used meteorological data beginning in 1979 to show that the snowfall in East Antarctica actually decreased by 11 billion tons per year during both the European Remote Sensing (ERS) and NASA’s Earth Observing System periods (ICESat).

They also used information on snow accumulation for tens of thousands of years, derived by other scientists from ice cores, to conclude that East Antarctica has been thickening for a very long time.

Zwally’s team found that the mass gain from the thickening of East Antarctica remained steady from 1992 to 2008 at 200 billion tons per year, while the ice losses from the coastal regions of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula increased by 65 billion tons per year.

Zwally said that the good news was that Antarctica was not currently contributing to sea level rise, but was taking 0.23 millimeters per year away.

However, he said that if the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that was not accounted for.

The study is published in the Journal of Glaciology.

NASA study: Net gains for Antarctic ice sheets

According to a new NASA study, ice sheet gains outweigh losses on the Antarctic continent. The findings conflict with those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in 2013 suggested gains were not keeping up with losses.

The new study, published in the Journal of Glaciology, doesn’t totally undermine the handful of studies showing significant glacier, ice sheet and sea ice shrinkage. Instead, if offers evidence of previously unaccounted gains.

The new tallies reveal an annual net gain of 112 billion tons between 1992 and 2001. Annual gains of 82 billion tons were observed between 2003 and 2008.

“We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” lead study author Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a press release. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica — there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.”

Zwally says the satellite measurements he and his colleagues analyzed reveal “small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.”

The gains came in the form of ice thickening — thickening researchers have previously dismissed as snow accumulations. But Zwally’s study looked at meteorological records to show that snow accumulations have actually dropped off over the last two decades. He and his colleagues also looked at historical meteorological data gleaned from ice cores, and found that snowfall from 10,000 years ago has been slowly compacted and turned into ice over the last several millennia.

The new findings may force scientists to rethink models that attempt to account for sea level rise.

“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”

Antarctica adding snow, not losing it according to NASA

NASA has come to what may seem like a surprising conclusion, ice in Antarctica isn’t shrinking, just the opposite, it has actually expanded to record levels. This challenges the commonly held narrative that global warming is causing ice levels in the Antarctic to shrink.

The ice shelves in Antarctica have now expanded to their largest size since scientists began to use satellite imagery to measure the overall size of the ice.

NASA has warned, however, that while Antarctica is slowly expanding, it is not expanding rapidly enough to offset the massive losses in the Arctic ice shelves at the north pole.

NASA provided the following statement:

Since the late 1970s, the Arctic has lost an average of 20,800 square miles (53,900 square kilometers) of ice a year; the Antarctic has gained an average of 7,300 square miles (18,900 sq km). On Sept. 19 this year, for the first time ever since 1979, Antarctic sea ice extent exceeded 7.72 million square miles (20 million square kilometers), according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The ice extent stayed above this benchmark extent for several days. The average maximum extent between 1981 and 2010 was 7.23 million square miles (18.72 million square kilometers).

Interestingly, global warming may still be the root cause of the expanding ice in Antarctica. Changing weather patterns could be sending cooler air to the south.

One theory suggests that a low-pressure system that is centered in the Amundsen Sea is growing stronger, or becoming more frequently. If so, the system could be sending warm air to the Antarctic Peninsula, where temperatures are rising, but pushing colder temperatures into the Ross Sea and elsewhere where ice is growing.

The jury, however, is still out on what is causing ice in the Antarctic to expand. While expanding ice may help reduce the effects of global warming by stabilizing water levels, and contributing elsewhere, NASA is already warning that the expansion is not enough.

NASA finds mass gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet greater than losses

A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.

The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.

According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.

“We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology.

“Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.”

Scientists calculate how much the ice sheet is growing or shrinking from the changes in surface height that are measured by the satellite altimeters. In locations where the amount of new snowfall accumulating on an ice sheet is not equal to the ice flow downward and outward to the ocean, the surface height changes and the ice-sheet mass grows or shrinks.

But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years – I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”

The study analyzed changes in the surface height of the Antarctic ice sheet measured by radar altimeters on two European Space Agency European Remote Sensing (ERS) satellites, spanning from 1992 to 2001, and by the laser altimeter on NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) from 2003 to 2008.

Zwally said that while other scientists have assumed that the gains in elevation seen in East Antarctica are due to recent increases in snow accumulation, his team used meteorological data beginning in 1979 to show that the snowfall in East Antarctica actually decreased by 11 billion tons per year during both the ERS and ICESat periods. They also used information on snow accumulation for tens of thousands of years, derived by other scientists from ice cores, to conclude that East Antarctica has been thickening for a very long time.

“At the end of the last Ice Age, the air became warmer and carried more moisture across the continent, doubling the amount of snow dropped on the ice sheet,” Zwally said.

The extra snowfall that began 10,000 years ago has been slowly accumulating on the ice sheet and compacting into solid ice over millennia, thickening the ice in East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica by an average of 0.7 inches (1.7 centimeters) per year. This small thickening, sustained over thousands of years and spread over the vast expanse of these sectors of Antarctica, corresponds to a very large gain of ice – enough to outweigh the losses from fast-flowing glaciers in other parts of the continent and reduce global sea level rise.

Zwally’s team calculated that the mass gain from the thickening of East Antarctica remained steady from 1992 to 2008 at 200 billion tons per year, while the ice losses from the coastal regions of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula increased by 65 billion tons per year.

“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”

“The new study highlights the difficulties of measuring the small changes in ice height happening in East Antarctica,” said Ben Smith, a glaciologist with the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in Zwally’s study.

“Doing altimetry accurately for very large areas is extraordinarily difficult, and there are measurements of snow accumulation that need to be done independently to understand what’s happening in these places,” Smith said.

To help accurately measure changes in Antarctica, NASA is developing the successor to the ICESat mission, ICESat-2, which is scheduled to launch in 2018. “ICESat-2 will measure changes in the ice sheet within the thickness of a No. 2 pencil,” said Tom Neumann, a glaciologist at Goddard and deputy project scientist for ICESat-2. “It will contribute to solving the problem of Antarctica’s mass balance by providing a long-term record of elevation changes.”


VIA: DAILY STAR ALBANY

__________________
I Am The Captain Of My Soul .. !
--- Nelson Mandela ..

Here are some disturbing things we have learned since December, when the nations of the world reached a landmark agreement in Paris to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

In January, scientists reported that 2015 was by far the hottest year on record, and another record could be set this year.

In February, a Princeton-based research organization said the tidal flooding that has already made life miserable for people in coastal cities like Miami and Charleston is getting steadily worse.

In mid-March, a group of experts, including James Hansen, the retired scientist who first brought the perils of climate change to Congress’s attention in 1988, warned that shifts in climate could be sudden and abrupt, giving humanity little time to prepare for flooding, severe droughts and other upheavals.

Now comes another scary prediction: If carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels continue unabated, the vast West Antarctic ice sheet could begin to disintegrate, causing the sea to rise by five to six feet by the end of the century, destroying coastal cities and low-lying island nations and creating environmental devastation within the lifetimes of children born today.

The startling new finding was published Wednesday in the journal Nature by two experts in ice-sheet behavior: Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and David Pollard of Pennsylvania State University. It paints a grimmer picture than the one presented only three years ago by a United Nations panel that forecast a maximum sea level rise of three feet by 2100. But that projection assumed only a minimal contribution from the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. And things could get worse in the centuries to come — the melting from Antarctica alone, not counting other factors like thermal expansion, could cause the seas to rise by nearly 50 feet by 2500, drowning many cities.

But the report also contains what passes for good news nowadays: The collapse of Antarctica is not inevitable, it says, and could be prevented with an aggressive global effort to keep greenhouse gases at or below the levels called for in Paris, where leaders embraced a goal of holding warming “well below” an increase of two degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels.


But the pledges made by individual countries will not come close to meeting those targets, which means a great deal more work lies ahead for all nations — particularly big emitters like China, the European Union and the United States — to avoid trigger points at which the big ice sheets will begin to melt.

It also means that the United States must continue to exercise leadership, which has suddenly been cast into doubt by the presidential campaign and the Supreme Court. President Obama has done his part, moving aggressively to increase automobile efficiency, develop cleaner sources of energy and impose strict new limits on greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants. The power plant rule in particular was crucial to securing agreements from other big coal users like China and India, and was important to the success of the Paris conference. But in February, the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to block that rule, pending a decision on its merits in a lower court.

In the meantime, Republican congressional leaders like Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, have been doing their best to make sure that King Coal reigns forever. Though the Democratic candidates take global warming seriously, the two leading Republican candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who don’t have a rudimentary grasp of the subject, are not only criticizing Mr. Obama’s initiatives but also questioning or denying the science of climate change


SOURCES : THE NY TIMES

__________________
I Am The Captain Of My Soul .. !
--- Nelson Mandela ..

NEW YORK • For half a century, climate scientists have seen the West Antarctic ice sheet, a remnant of the last Ice Age, as a sword of Damocles hanging over human civilisation.

The great ice sheet, larger than Mexico, is thought to be potentially vulnerable to disintegration from a relatively small amount of global warming, and capable of raising the sea level by 3.6m or more should it break up. But researchers long assumed that the worst effects would take hundreds - if not thousands - of years to occur.

Now, new research suggests the disaster scenario could play out much sooner.


Continued high emissions of heat-trapping gases could launch a disintegration of the ice sheet within decades, according to a study published on Wednesday, heaving enough water into the ocean to raise the sea level by as much as 1m by the end of this century.

With ice melting in other regions too, the total sea level rise could reach almost 2m by 2100, the researchers found. That is roughly twice the increase reported as a plausible worst-case scenario by a United Nations panel just three years ago, and so high that it would likely provoke a deep crisis within the lifetime of children being born now.


The situation would become far worse beyond 2100, the researchers found, with the rise of the sea exceeding 30cm per decade by the middle of next century.

Scientists have documented such rates of increase in the geological past, when far larger ice sheets were collapsing, but most of them had long assumed that it would be impossible to reach rates so extreme with the smaller ice sheets of today.

"We are not saying this is definitely going to happen," said Dr David Pollard, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University and a co-author of the new paper.

"But I think we are pointing out that there's a danger, and it should receive a lot more attention."

The long-term effect would likely be to drown the world's coastlines, including many of its great cities.

New York is nearly 400 years old; in the worst-case scenario conjured by the research, its chances of surviving another 400 years in anything like its present form would appear to be remote. Miami, New Orleans, London, Venice, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Sydney are all just as vulnerable as New York, or more so.

In principle, coastal defences could be built to protect the densest cities, but experts believe it would be impossible to do that along all 152,888km of the American coastline, meaning that immense areas will most likely have to be abandoned to the rising sea.

The new research, published by the journal Nature, is based on an improved computerised model of Antarctica and its complex landscape of rocks and glaciers that is meant to capture factors newly recognised as imperilling the stability of the ice.

The new version of the model allowed the scientists, for the first time, to reproduce high sea levels of the past, such as a climatic period about 125,000 years ago when the seas rose to levels 6m to 9m higher than they are today.

That gave the researchers greater confidence in the model's ability to project the future sea level, although they acknowledge that they do not yet have an answer that could be called definitive.

The new research is the work of two scientists who have been at the forefront of ice sheet modelling for years. They are Dr Pollard and Professor Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

NEW YORK TIMES

__________________
I Am The Captain Of My Soul .. !
--- Nelson Mandela ..