3/28/2023 0 Comments Layer cake screenit![]() ![]() Since the 1970s, and as recently as 1998, researchers flying over the region mistook radar images of these structures for hills. As meltwater at the bottom refreezes over hundreds to thousands of years, the researchers believe it radiates heat into the surrounding ice sheet, making it pick up its pace as the ice becomes softer and flows more easily. The structures cover about a tenth of northern Greenland, the researchers estimate, becoming bigger and more common as the ice sheet narrows into ice streams, or glaciers, headed for the sea. "We think the refreezing process uplifts, distorts and warms the ice above, making it softer and easier to flow." "We see more of these features where the ice sheet starts to go fast," said the study's lead author, Robin Bell, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The results are published in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience. The newly revealed forms may help scientists understand more about how ice sheets behave and how they will respond to a warming climate. Using ice-penetrating radar, researchers have discovered ragged blocks of ice as tall as city skyscrapers and as wide as the island of Manhattan at the very bottom of the ice sheet, apparently formed as water beneath the ice refreezes and warps the surrounding ice upwards. view moreīeneath the barren whiteness of Greenland, a mysterious world has popped into view. It's the cinematic equivalent of getting a punch in the mind's eye by a bunch of fairies wearing the coolest Doc Martens this side of Florin.Image: Melting and refreezing at the bottom of ice sheets warps the layer-cake structure above, as seen in this radar image from Greenland. Still, Stardust has lost a good amount of its magic in the transformation from page to screen. Danes does space debris proud, though, and her performance, along with Pfeiffer's insidiously wicked turn as Lamia and the aforementioned left turn into Bizarro World by De Niro, keeps the whole shebang afloat. Everyone except Tristran is searching for the fallen star for nefarious ends, and Cox, who barely registers as the heroic archetype in the film's opening is by the end trading thrusts and parries with Pfeiffer and Strong like a lankier Errol Flynn minus the charm. Specifically, fraught with Pfeiffer as Lamia, the grand dame of a triplet of witchy sisters, as well as seedy prince Septimus (Strong) and his pals Lords Primus and Secundus (Flemyng, Everett). His quest takes him into the fairy-tale land of Stormhold, where he discovers that the celestial fragment he seeks is actually Danes, which makes his promise to Victoria all the more interesting and his return all the more fraught. Cox plays Tristran, a nervy young man who sets out from his rural England town of Wall to retrieve a fallen star for his (he assumes) true love, Victoria (Miller). The plot eliminates much of Gaiman's original novel while keeping the resonant core and adding a flouncing De Niro to the mix. Vaughn previously helmed the excellent London-set neo-noir Layer Cake, which seems a veritable font of cinematic restraint in comparison to Stardust. Too much fantasy is never enough, however, for Vaughn and his actors, who appear to be having way too much fun with their roles to worry about the niceties of narrative overcrowding. ![]() Vaughn's movie feels, on the other hand, clogged with perhaps too much fairy dust it's like double-dosing Tori Amos and Arthur Machen while setting The Princess Bride on stutter. "Fairies wear boots," recalled a sage and seasoned wise man whose name eludes me at the moment, "I tell you no lies." That's as good a description as any for this uneven adaptation of Neil Gaiman's bestselling, back-to-basics "fairy tale," which in the reading felt more like an extended, prose-heavy issue of the author's first and greatest success: the comics series Sandman (a landmark of the art form that breezed through history both real and imagined and wove a truly magical tapestry out of Gaiman's seemingly unslakable thirst for the myriad mythologies that, then as now, act as civilization's crystalline framework. ![]()
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