Warming Trend Read Online Free

flag while her competitors had veered off course. When she’d come across the finish line he’d swung her around and around until she was dizzy. She’d been maybe thirteen? She’d never forget Tonk Senior and Bannon and Jeeves and Klinkatet. Beautiful dogs. They’d loved racing.
    She wondered what had happened to Tonk Junior. No matter how mad Eve had been with her, Ani knew in her heart that she wouldn’t have taken it out on Tonk. Tonk was still in a loving home, older and slower, but happy. Had to be.
    She opened her eyes to the dazzle of orange-gold light. The sounds of puppies and dogs at play in the dog park brought painful nostalgia, but not so much that she wanted to move. She deserved the reminder. She’d disappointed Monica Tyndell, broken Eve’s heart, and Tonk wouldn’t have understood why one day Ani didn’t come back. Dogs only understood hellos, not goodbyes.
    Damn. Okay, time for some data to distract her. She studied her way through another temperature table in geoLogics , this time for what was left of the ice sheet near Ellesmere Island, then decided it was time for Alaska Today . She’d never read the magazine when she’d lived there, but now every article held some element of interest. It didn’t matter if the subject was netting salmon on Cook Inlet or bull moose locking horns in Denali. In the Keys she was daily surrounded by yellow sunshine. The photographs from home had blues, beautiful deep, rich saturating blues. Blues in the ice, blues in the ocean, blues in the rivers and even tinting the spruce. Without mountains, it seemed, there were no real blues.
    She drank it all in. A recipe from Ketchikan for new pea salad recalled her mother’s Easter dinners. A bed-and-breakfast just outside Anchorage reminded her of the place her folks had run for a while when she was small. Her mother had done most of the work, but dad had helped out between his expeditions. After her mom’s death, Dad had sold the B&B for a tidy sum, a chunk of which had helped with Ani’s first four years of college, with some left over to get her foot in the door at grad school, along with her scholarship. Fat lot of good that had done.
    “Hey fancy meeting you here.”
    Ani looked up into a flash of blond hair. It took a moment to recognize the face without the snowsuit hood framing it. “Oh, hey.”
    Lisa plopped onto the towel next to her. “So where’s that date of yours?”
    The question didn’t seem hostile, though the lift to Lisa’s eyebrows suggested doubt at the existence of any date. Ani indicated her reading material. “You’re looking at it.”
    Lisa frowned as she picked up the geoLogics . “I can’t say I think much of your priorities.”
    “To each her own.” Ani held out one hand for the journal.
    Lisa continued to study it. “So is global warming real?”
    “Yes it is. We might be in a warming era anyway, but our own pollution is accelerating it faster than our ability to adapt.”
    Pointing at a column of core temperature readings for the polar ice sheet, Lisa asked, “How can solid ice have different temperatures and still be frozen? Or is that a stupid question?”
    “It’s not a stupid question.” Ani shaded her eyes and was surprised to see that Lisa was serious. She knew a lot of women who ran screaming from data tables. “Fresh water forms the crystal structure of ice beginning at thirty-two degrees at sea level. As the temperature decreases, the crystal structure gets stronger. The inner temperature of the ice reaches a point where its strength turns brittle. Past that point the crystal structure is prone to shattering.”
    “So that’s why avalanches are more risky when the temperatures stay unnaturally low?”
    Ani hoped she didn’t look as surprised as she felt. “That’s right. Glacial calving is also more likely in extreme cold.”
    Lisa dropped the journal onto the towel and gave Ani her full attention. “Just because I don’t look like I went to college