Best Of MetaFilter

Sometimes metaphors really are a thing of beauty. Not often in internet parley, but sometimes. Baby_Balrog on barns, and Canada and stuff in the East Coast Is Sinking thread.

Dreyfusfinucane talks about sea ice and salt and how they affect the temperature of the ocean within climate change.

An iceberg floats in Disko Bay, near Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 24, 2015. The massive Greenland ice sheet is shedding about 300 gigatons of ice a year into the ocean, making it the single largest source of sea level rise from melting ice. Credits: NASA/Saskia Madlener

Cold Dawn, Warm World by marktmcn (cc by)

For millennia, people of all different cultures have done things with unintended consequences that changed and sometimes ruined their environment, from over-hunting megafauna in the Americas to salination of ancient Sumerian irrigated fields to deforestation which led to disasters in 19th century northern China ... jb on the the climate crisis, with an historical view of human perception and the externalities leading to disastrous outcomes

MacMummy - Birth (Harry Burton Style) by vintagedept (cc by)

ominous sarcophagus; exhilarating ichnology; how now Homo sapiens?; exasperation excavation; crowdfunded dig dug; preservation annihilation; dig diaries; parched plots expose lots.

Pont en Royans by FrenchHope (cc by)

Recently on Mefi, people and places around the world, enchanting, mysterious and magnetic:

Good luck finding parking: "The Precarious Architecture of 7 European Cliff Cities"

The REMAINS of Greenland project is attempting to locate and preserve archaeological sites in Greenland before they are lost to the destructive effects of climate change

Italians Compare the Arrival of Starbucks to the Apocalypse: pjsky's roundup of the unthinkable

Grace's Guide to British Industrial History is a project publishing the history of industry in the UK and elsewhere

"Being Iceland, it gets complicated": Saga Thing is a podcast about the Sagas of the Icelanders

Roadtrip like it's 1966: 1966 video photolog trips of selected highways via BC Ministry of Transportation

No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end: A short video from the British Geological Survey about Siccar Point

Stirring Up a Bloom off Patagonia by NASA Goddard Photo and Video (cc by)

Will it snowball? Arguable. There are plentiful arguments about the mode of evolution and lots of controversy. There's one school that says ecologies are robust within certain limits - past those limits and things fall apart. There are others that argue for a more dynamic view, where is set off-balance the system could rapidly change until it finds a new equilibria.