A glacier is never going to form in Sacramento, regardless of it being 70 degrees in May

It's May, the school year is almost over, and it's time for three months of relaxing by the beach and doing outdoors-y type things like hiking and camping. However, for these types of things, a warm temperature is somewhat necessary. Unfortunately, the temperatures lately have been somewhat on the cooler side. Although chilly and not as warm and humid as it usually is this time of year, it is not quite cold enough for say, a glacier to form. A glacier is a large formation of ice resting on land or floating in a body of water. In order for a glacier to form, the climate obviously must be much cooler than it is in Sacramento in May, regardless of how chilly it currently is. Glaciers form in one of two places: either they form in areas of high altitude, such as mountains, or they form outside of the mountains. When formed on mountains or other areas of high altitude, the glacier is called "Alpine". When formed outside of the mountains, in areas of high latitude, the glacier is called "Continental". Wherever the glacier is formed, it must be in an incredibly cold area with high levels of snowfall. This is because glaciers are merely the accumulation of snow that is packed down and compressed and turns into ice. The weight of the top layers of snow compresses the bottom layers of snow, turning it into firn, a pebbly type of snow between soft, fluffy snow and hard, solid ice. After the firn stage, the snow turns into solid ice and becomes a glacier. This can take an extremely long time; as long as 1,000 years in a dry climate such as Antarctica. Obviously, this is never going to happen in Sacramento. 70 degrees in May or not. However, global climate change makes anything possible.

Acid rain and why it can help my life right now

It's getting towards the end of the year and I've stopped wanting to go to any of my classes. It's not that I don't like them, it's just that having to spend at least an hour a day twice a week for the last four months has gotten really tiring and grinding. In the pursuit of avoiding spending an hour a day twice a week in my exhausting, now irritating classes, I've begun ditching. This plan of just not going works very well a majority of the time. I sleep in and no one ever finds out. However, this plan does not work for classes that take roll periodically, which is a fair amount of my classes. For these classes, a more drastic approach is necessary, like praying for a flood or a power outage or perhaps a flat tire for the professor. Or maybe, the swift deterioration of the building due to denudation. Denudation is the term used for all the processes by which weathering occurs. These processes include weathering, mass movement, erosion, transportation, and deposition. The most likely way that this would happen is through carbonation and solution. Carbonation and solution are forms of chemical weathering whereby carbonic acid from carbon dioxide is dissolved in water and deteriorates buildings. This kind of weathering is often described as acid rain, where carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere and comes down when it rains. It can be seen on ancient sculptures ad buildings that look particularly worn and deteriorated. While this kind of deterioration takes years and decades and millennia to work, I can hope that a bucket of carbonic acid has been released into the atmosphere and will come down in acid rain only in the general direction of the halls where my classes are. Or I can just suck it up and wait until the semester is over. Which is only in a few days. So I'll probably just do that.

Clouds; or I Can't Think of a Clever Title

I got out of my Theatrical Lighting Design class early last Thursday and I didn't want to pace for one and a half hours or sit in the Green Room in the theatre building on Facebook for extended periods of time, so I figured I'd go sit in my car and listen to music. I walked all the way to the parking structure, up the stairs to the top floor, got in my car, rolled the window down, put my feet out the window, and turned on the radio. It was relaxing and I nearly fell asleep. Figuring that "I was taking a nap" would be a bad excuse for being late to my next class, I kept myself alert by watching the clouds. This made me think of Geography and what clouds are. Clouds are evaporated water droplets made into ice crystals that are suspended in the atmosphere, meaning that, despite their fluffy appearance, they would be incredibly unpleasant to actually be in. There are several different types of clouds. Cirrocumulus, Cirrus, and Cirrostratus are all clouds that form at high altitude. Altostratus and Altocumulus are all clouds that form at middling ranges. Cumulus, Stratocumulus, Nimbostratus, and Stratus are all clouds that form in lower altitudes. The clouds that I could see from my car window that afternoon were Cumulus, which are the big, fluffy clouds that one thinks of when one thinks of clouds. Cliche clouds. They were moving slowly across the sky, which is due to wind currents pushing the clusters of ice crystals through the atmosphere. It was a hypnotic sight and I wish I could have stayed. But, alas, class was a necessity.