martyna fornal

The year 2022 is exceptional. There are basically three reasons for the strong retreat of the glaciers this year, according to experts. One is the low snowfall in winter and spring. Another is sand from the Sahara Desert that blew all the way to Switzerland between March and May and deposited on ice and snow. The contaminated snow absorbed more solar energy and melted faster. Finally, the exceptional summer heatwave resulted in record temperatures even at high altitudes. Annual ice loss around 2% of a glacier’s overall volume was called extreme   by glaciologists but this year Switzerland’s glaciers have lost an average of 6.2% of their ice.   Thanks in part to work by the charitable organization Alpine Glacier Project we can observe the effect of our warming climate through chemically monitoring changes in meltwater, topographically surveying the landscape and by taking photos from the same position over the years. Over the project’s five decades, Gorner Glacier and Findel G...

  In language that we speak every day we use phenomenon  known as colour categorization. That means  grouping of shades in the same category and that only a limited number of words are used to refer to them. It shows that the world of colours, like many other aspects of perception, can be affected by cultural influences and by our learning experiences. As an example, in English and Spanish, there is one basic term to refer to bluish colours. However, in languages such as Russian, Greek and Turkish, there are different terms for light blue and dark blue. Several studies have shown that speakers of these languages are quicker and more confident when it comes to differentiating between intermediate shades of colours.  Also the classic study by anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969) shows that what we find is a universal pattern that revolves around the six basic colours: white, black, blue, yellow, green and red. I think this is really interesting  that...