Today's Wisdom - Glaciers, Trade and Habits

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A glacier looks, to the naked eye, like the most stationary thing on Earth. Vast, silent, and ancient, it sits in its valley or spreads across its polar plain with the appearance of something that has simply always been there and always will be. In reality, a glacier is a river, just one moving at a pace so slow that an entire human life can pass without witnessing its progress. Glaciers form when more snow falls in winter than melts in summer. Over centuries that accumulated snowfall compresses under its own weight into dense glacial ice which behaves like an enormously viscous fluid. The world's glaciers currently hold around 69 percent of all the fresh water on Earth, locked into formations that in some cases are more than a mile thick and have been building for hundreds of thousands of years. Antarctica's Lambert Glacier, the largest in the world, is around 260 miles long and 60 miles wide (an area roughly the size of England) and it moves about a quarter of a mile per year. The Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland, by contrast, is one of the fastest glaciers on Earth, moving at around 40 to 50 meters per day, fast enough that with patience and a long afternoon you could actually watch it go.

The mechanics by which glaciers move are more complex and more fascinating than simple sliding, and scientists spent the better part of two centuries arguing about which process was dominant before concluding that the answer is all of them working simultaneously. The first mechanism is internal deformation with the ice crystals deep within the glacier slowly reorienting and slipping past one another under the enormous pressure of the mass above, in a process that resembles the way a deck of cards spreads when you press down and push. The second is basal sliding, where the glacier glides across the bedrock beneath it on a thin film of meltwater generated by the pressure and geothermal heat at its base, essentially lubricating its own path forward. The third, and the one that most surprised researchers when it was properly understood, is bed deformation. In glaciers sitting on soft sediment rather than hard rock, the sheer weight of the ice deforms the ground itself, which shifts and flows and carries the glacier with it like a conveyor belt made of mud. The relative contribution of each process varies enormously depending on the glacier's temperature, its underlying geology, and the amount of meltwater present, which is precisely why two glaciers sitting on the same mountain can move at dramatically different speeds and in subtly different ways.

As a glacier advances it functions as a geological bulldozer of almost incomprehensible power, grinding bedrock into fine powder called rock flour, carving the characteristic U-shaped valleys that distinguish glaciated landscapes from those shaped by rivers, and dragging boulders hundreds of miles from their point of origin before depositing them seemingly at random in the middle of flat plains. The fjords of Norway, the lakes of the Scottish Highlands, the Great Lakes of North America, and the sharp arêtes of the Alps were all carved by glaciers during the last ice age, which reached its peak around 20,000 years ago and covered roughly a third of the Earth's land surface in ice. Today, virtually every glacier on Earth is retreating at a pace that has no precedent in the geological record of the last several thousand years, with the World Glacier Monitoring Service recording accelerating losses across every mountain range on every continent. Montana's Glacier National Park had 150 glaciers in 1910. It has 26 today. The ice that took hundreds of thousands of years to accumulate is, in the span of a single human lifetime, going back to the sea and unlike the glacier itself, that particular journey happens very quickly indeed.

When two countries can't agree on whether a tariff violates international trade rules, they file a complaint with the World Trade Organization and let a panel of three trade law experts decide who's right. The WTO's dispute settlement system, created in 1995, exists because the previous system under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade allowed countries to block rulings against themselves and drag cases out indefinitely. The new system fixed that by imposing strict timelines and making decisions automatic unless all 164 member countries voted to reject them. The process starts with consultations where countries try to negotiate a settlement, and if that fails, the complaining country requests a panel of experts to hear the case. The panel issues a report within nine months determining whether the accused country violated WTO rules, and the losing side can appeal to the Appellate Body, a standing group of seven trade law judges who review the legal reasoning and issue a final ruling. The entire process is supposed to take 12-15 months from complaint to final decision. Since 1995, WTO members have filed 631 disputes, and the system has issued over 350 rulings on everything from European subsidies to Airbus, to Chinese restrictions on rare earth exports, to U.S. steel tariffs. The system simply declares whether a country's trade policy violates the rules it agreed to follow, and if the country doesn't comply, the winner gets authorization to impose retaliatory tariffs of equivalent value.

The genius of the system was that it gave small countries the same legal standing as superpowers. Ecuador could sue the United States over banana import restrictions and win. Vietnam could challenge American anti-dumping duties on shrimp and force a settlement. The threat of an adverse ruling gave countries an incentive to settle disputes before they escalated into trade wars, and most cases ended in negotiated solutions rather than final judgments. The system worked so well that it was called the "crown jewel" of the WTO and the most successful international dispute resolution mechanism ever created. But it only worked as long as countries accepted the rulings as legitimate, and that consensus started breaking down in the 2000s when the United States began complaining that the Appellate Body was engaging in "judicial overreach" by interpreting trade agreements too broadly and creating new obligations that member countries never agreed to. American officials, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, argued that the Appellate Body was supposed to interpret existing rules, not act like a supreme court making new law. The frustration intensified under President Trump, whose Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer compiled a 174-page report in 2020 detailing how the Appellate Body had exceeded its mandate, ignored time limits, and interfered with U.S. sovereignty over trade remedies like anti-dumping duties. Whether these complaints were legitimate grievances or sour grapes over losing cases became irrelevant, because the U.S. had the power to destroy the system by simply refusing to approve new judges.

Starting in 2016, the United States blocked every appointment to the Appellate Body, and by December 11, 2019, only one member remained, two short of the three-judge quorum needed to hear appeals. The Appellate Body ceased functioning, and the entire dispute settlement system collapsed. Under WTO rules, any country can appeal a panel ruling, and without an Appellate Body to hear the appeal, the case just sits there unresolved forever, a strategy now known as "appealing into the void." As of April 2025, 32 panel rulings have been appealed into the void, including 11 cases against the United States, which now uses the broken system to avoid compliance with WTO rules it doesn't like. In 2020, a panel ruled that Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs violated WTO commitments, and the U.S. simply appealed into the void and kept the tariffs in place indefinitely. The EU and 50+ other countries created a workaround called the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement, an alternative appellate system that works between participating members, but the U.S. and India refused to join, limiting its effectiveness. The Biden administration continued blocking Appellate Body appointments despite promises to restore multilateralism, and the second Trump administration that took office in January 2025 shows no interest in fixing the system. The irony is that the United States pushed hardest for a binding dispute settlement system when the WTO was created in 1995 because it didn't trust other countries to follow trade rules voluntarily, and now it has destroyed the very system it built because it doesn't like losing cases. The global trading system isn't collapsing, it's just reverting to the pre-1995 world where the biggest economies do whatever they want and smaller countries have no recourse except retaliation they can't afford.

Below - Number of disputes initiated, original panels established and notifications of appeal in original proceedings in World Trade Court 1995-2024.

In October 2019, Eliud Kipchoge ran a marathon in 1 hour 59 minutes and 40 seconds in Vienna, becoming the first human being in history to run 26.2 miles in under two hours. He averaged a pace of 4 minutes and 34 seconds per mile for the entire distance, which is a speed most recreational runners cannot sustain for a single minute. Kipchoge trained 120 miles a week, slept nine hours a night, ate simple whole foods, and lived in a communal training camp in the Rift Valley of Kenya where he washed his own clothes, cooked with his teammates, and kept a handwritten journal every single day. When asked about his performance after crossing the finish line, he said the victory was not about his legs but about his mind, and that a man who controls his mind can control his life. He was describing, with characteristic precision, the single most consistent finding to emerge from decades of research into what separates elite endurance athletes from everyone else. The physical differences, while real, are considerably smaller than most people assume.

The physiology of elite runners does offer some genuine insights, though perhaps not the ones people expect. VO2 max, the maximum rate at which the body can consume oxygen during exercise, is the number most often cited as the defining measure of running potential. But among elite athletes themselves, VO2 max turns out to be a surprisingly poor predictor of who wins races, because at the top level everyone's ceiling is high. What separates the best from the very best is running economy, the efficiency with which a runner converts oxygen into forward motion (essentially how little energy they waste with each stride). Kenyan and Ethiopian runners, who have dominated long-distance running for half a century, tend to have exceptionally high running economy. This is partly due to physiology, including proportionally lighter lower limbs which require less energy to swing forward with each step, and partly due to a lifetime of barefoot or minimal-footwear running from childhood that develops a more mechanically efficient gait than anything a coach can teach in adult life.

However, what is most transferable from the lives of elite runners is the architecture of their daily existence, which turns out to be strikingly uniform across cultures, continents, and generations. They sleep more than anyone else, studies of Olympic athletes consistently show averages of nine to ten hours per night, with naps common in the afternoon. They treat food with the same pragmatism they apply to training, favoring caloric density and whole ingredients over complexity or restriction. They run most of their miles at a pace that feels almost embarrassingly easy. Around 80 percent of total training volume for most elite programs is done at low intensity, a principle called polarized training that contradicts the instinct of most amateur runners to train hard every day. Perhaps most instructively, virtually every elite runner studied over the long term demonstrates an almost monastic consistency. Kipchoge runs with a group of training partners at 5 am in the Kenyan highlands and has done so, with almost no interruption, for twenty years. The lesson the elite runners keep teaching, in every study and every interview and every training log, is that excellence is simply a matter of consistency.

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Until next time... A Little Wiser Team