From what I remember from the days when I was young and believed a great many wrong things, Chicken Little was a character who acted like a mindless chicken and ran about shouting that the "Sky is Falling".  What caused her to do this escapes me right now but the news that the LAND IS RISING, has just come out although the physics of the event has been understood for ages.

It appears that when the glaciers were building up for millions of years, their weight (sometimes measured in miles high masses of compacted snow) pressed down on the land underneath and caused it to sink.  Taking place over such a long time and with all that weight sitting on land underneath, put pressure on what we would call dirt and smashed it down maybe not a mile underneath but quite a distance.

This is proven by reports now coming in from lands that have been covered by glaciers.  The land is rising from its compaction and is above sea level.  That is fine for those few who live in Alaska, on Iceland, northern Norway, Sweden and those other countries above the Arctic Circle.  It is also news (maybe good and maybe bad) for the penguins in Antarctica.  So, the land is rising in some places.  It is interesting to note that not many people live in those places.  If the glaciers are melting underneath the top of the peaks of Belgium and Northern Italy, the rise of the land will be barely noticeable - although the skiers will find fewer places in which to practice their skills.

Will the rise of land under melting glaciers improve the chances of those of us on coastal Florida to escape what has been projected as inevitable inundation?  The rise of the land under Glaciers might give us hope for I have long accepted the idea that the seas will rise and maybe one day be above the first floor of our Condominium.  Even so there is hope that living on the third floor will save us although those on the first two floors might be unhappy.

So, a conclusion of this essay might properly be a perversion of Chicken Little's cry that the Sky is Falling.  The land (in some places) is actually rising because the weight of ice on that land is lifted.  So, THE LAND IS RISING or the SKY IS FALLING are cautionary cries which may or may not affect the floor of my building on which I live. Maybe rising and falling will cancel each other out?

Instead of a new little car that sips gas, perhaps I should look forward to a canoe or skiff to go to the store in order to shop.