An amplification of processes that already occur

[Image: Glacier-protection services in the Swiss Alps; photo by Olivier Maire/Epa/Corbis, via the Guardian].

Several posts in our Glacier/Island/Storm blog week are already up and working it:

Nick Sowers, Design to Fail: In which we read about tree-bombing Guam, the unintended reuse of abandoned military artifacts, global climate change as national security threat, and how all architects should plan for the failure of their most grandiose ideas.

InfraNet Lab, LandFab, or Manufacturing Terrain: In which we read about "volcanic heroism," desert islands, "politically anomalous artificial land fabrication," and a brief history of dredging in the Florida Everglades (perhaps vaguely related: Prosthetic Delta).

mammoth, a glacier is a very long event: In which we read about the self-altering internal torque of metamorphic glaciers, salt farms, shell middens, the ecological redesign of an abandoned landfill, accretionary geographies, and much more.

The title of this post, meanwhile, comes from mammoth, as cited above. It was also chosen as way of pointing out that, while this week pretends toward the status of symposium—that is, multiple blogs with different backgrounds all pursuing a shared suite of themes and references at the same time for a limited period—it is, in reality, no more than what already happens in the deep chains of internet conversation everyday. I write a post referring to something on Pruned; Pruned perhaps saw something tweeted by Ballardian or Alexis Madrigal; the link in question might have come from an Archinect board or even Metafilter; and the endlessly marbled laminations of successive re-linking never cease to accumulate. That's how things are; that's simply what happens. This is not distortion, we might say, and it is certainly nothing new; it is just an amplification of processes that already occur.

(There may or may not be Twitter updates throughout the week using the #glacierislandstorm hashtag).