Pinedale OFFline
Pinedale, Wyoming 

Geology and fossils reveal astonishing Climate Change find
"It literally has been right in front of us the entire time," said archaeologist Richard O'Malley, "we just didn't understand the significance of what we were looking at."

The discovery came about as climatologists were conferring with archaeologists from the Rocky Mountain Field School trying to understand the unusually high amounts of snow and ice in the Upper Green River Valley this past winter. "We haven't seen accumulations depths like this in Pinedale for years," O'Malley said. "But we can look all around the valley and see that this same thing has happened here before." The scientist was referring to the glacial lakes that dot the valley, including Fremont, Boulder, Willow and New Fork lakes that are all known to have been created by the scouring by deep glacial ice some time in the past. "This ice sheet that moved across the landscape was thousands of feet thick, pretty much right over the top of where Pinedale is today," O'Malley said.

The puzzling part is that scientists are also finding fossils of palm trees, crocodiles, turtles and sea-going creatures not far from the areas of the deeply carved glaciated valleys.

"We thought we were dealing with millions of years between all these climate swing events," O'Malley said. "Then we realized how wrong we had to be in our thinking. We were completely misreading the radiocarbon date data. The evidence was screaming it at us over and over again as we were finding these things side by side, we just didn't make the connection. It's amazing what an error of a decimal place or two in the scientific dating can reveal about the timing of things. This wasn't evidence of climate change over time, it was evidence of dramatic climate change over incredibly short distances in space!"

"We realized we were seeing a combination of the Polar Vortex effect combining with the Tropical Vortex weather patterns merging right on top of the Upper Green River Valley to create micro macro climates," he said. "It was like a perfect storm scenario."

"Climate change is real," he said, "and we are seeing it happen right before our eyes here in the Upper Green River Valley today. We're once again Ground Zero for events that are dramatically reshaping our environment even in our own lifetimes."

The new findings will be released in the next edition of 'Climate Change Today' and will have computer enhanced depictions of what the Green River Valley looked like in the not-so-distant past when the Continental Ice Sheet met glacial ice flowing down from the Wind River Mountains to the valley floor, slamming into the heat wave of the Nina Nino Vortices that created the lush tropical environment lower down. "And we're seeing it shaping into the same dynamic now." O'Malley said, "What we saw this past winter is just a taste of what we predict will be these same patterns all coming back again upon us. History does repeat itself."

White Pine to use "Groombots" to manicure ski slopes
for 2014-2015 winter season

They’re called “Groombots,” designed specifically for use on ski slopes. The new models were inspired by combining self-propelled robot vacuum cleaner concepts with the latest in hovering drone technology to create a machine that can take over the task of grooming ski trail slopes on an entire ski area on a daily basis during the worst of winter conditions and challenging topography.

A key improvement is the capacity of the groombots to operate in unison as a fleet or independently to do solo tidy-up grooming. They incorporate wireless technology which helps them to avoid obstacles like the lifts, trees or rocks on the slopes and to determine when a ski trail is complete and to move onto the next.

The new smart models have an intelligent sensing system that can detect foreign objects and a re-designed internal bin to collect and hold lost gloves and ski caps found on the slopes during their routine maintenance passes.

The bots are environmentally green using solar power. They find an out-of-the-way place on sideslopes to go inactive and “sleep” during the day absorbing solar radiation to recharge their internal batteries. They are completely recharged and ready to go back into operation at nightfall, when they power back up and run all night to have the slopes nicely groomed by morning.

The new Groombots are expected to pay for themselves within two years freeing up ski area staff to concentrate on their human customers.

APRIL FOOLS!