Earth's Terrifying Ancient Rock Record →

Peter Brannen of The Atlantic writes “The Terrifying Warning Lurking In the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record.”

In 2021, we find ourselves in an unusual situation: We live on a world with massive ice sheets, one of which covers one of the seven continents and is more than a mile deep. For most of the planet’s past, it has had virtually no ice whatsoever. The periods of extreme cold—like the ultra-ancient, phantasmagoric nightmares of Snowball Earth, when the oceans might have been smothered by ice sheets all the way to the tropics—are outliers. There were a few other surprising pulses of frost here and there, but they merely punctuate the balmy stretches of the fossil record. For almost all of the Earth’s history, the planet was a much warmer place than it is today, with much higher CO2 levels. This is not a climate-denying talking point; it’s a physical fact, and acknowledging it does nothing to take away from the potential catastrophe of future warming. After all, we humans, along with everything else alive today, evolved to live in our familiar low-CO2 world—a process that took a long time. > Read More

Photo Illustration by Brendan Pattengale

Trees Talk →

Scientists On How Trees Talk Through an Ancient ‘Otherworld’ Network

Trees talk to each other deep underground. It’s an idea still relatively new to science but familiar to ancient beliefs. > Read More

Pandemic Appeal: Getting Lost In A Labyrinth →

Laura Bliss of Bloomberg City Lab writes The Pandemic-Era Appeal of Getting Lost in a Labyrinth.

“Interest is growing in the intriguing structures designed for mindfulness, from backyard installations to finger tracing.

Lars Howlett is one of the country’s foremost labyrinth makers. For churches, hospitals, schools, estates, county fairs, and thousands of YouTube viewers, he’s designed, built, and taught the creation of these spiral-like walking paths. His services range from a $600 labyrinth consultation to a full-blown $25,000 installation.

Lately, his Bay Area-based business is booming. While institutional projects — normally Howlett’s bread and butter — have fallen to the wayside with many campuses and religious sites closed, homeowners hoping to build private backyard labyrinths have become the bulk of his client base. Since March, Howlett has worked on several residential projects in California, including one in a palatial Bel Air estate with a shape mimicking the famous labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France. Demand has also surged for his summer labyrinth-making workshops, which he’d normally hold in person; this year they have shifted online and have seen enrollment triple.” > Read More

Where Will Everyone Go? →

ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center, have for the first time modeled how climate refugees might move across international borders. Abrahm Lustgarten writes:

"Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope — until, without warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might die, too.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys — the residents have largely stayed. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge."

Read this article in full here.

Climate Study Rules Out Less Severe Global Warming Scenarios →

"The current pace of human-caused carbon emissions is increasingly likely to trigger irreversible damage to the planet, according to a comprehensive international study released Wednesday. Researchers studying one of the most important and vexing topics in climate science — how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — found that warming is extremely unlikely to be on the low end of estimates.

These scientists now say it is likely that if human activities — such as burning oil, gas and coal along with deforestation — push carbon dioxide to such levels, the Earth’s global average temperature will most likely increase between 4.1 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 and 4.5 degrees Celsius). The previous and long-standing estimated range of climate sensitivity, as first laid out in a 1979 report, was 2.7 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 4.5 Celsius)."

Read more from Andrew Freedman and Chris Mooney’s in The Washington Post here.

A Plague Is An Apocalypse

Andrew Sullivan of New York Magazine writes A Plague Is an Apocalypse:. But It Can Bring a New World.

“It’s strange that we now see America threatened by a plague. Because without plague, America, as we know it, wouldn’t exist.

It may have been the most devastating epidemic in the history of humankind — surpassing in its mortality rates any before or since, including the Black Death in the Europe of the mid-14th century. Smallpox arrived in America with the first Europeans and went on, with several other imported diseases, to wipe out up to 90 percent of the Native population in a relatively short amount of time — millions and maybe tens of millions died.

They were horrible, harrowing deaths. The virus Variola major incubated for two weeks, followed by an intense few days of fever, before the pustules emerged: first in the mouth, throat, and nasal passages, then all over the body, including around the eyes, where they often caused blindness. A human being would struggle for perhaps ten days, covered in these sores, erupting in bloody and pus-filled bumps — and then, with luck, the illness subsided. The sores healed; the pockmarks, highly visible on the face, remained. The residue from these sores was also terribly infectious and lingered on surfaces or cloth for years — but scholars now consider the vast majority of deaths, just like those from COVID-19, to have been from human-to-human transmission.” > Read More

Rock Dust Could Be Farming’s Next Climate Solution →

“For farming, the latest climate fix isn’t especially high tech or glossy. By spreading rock dust over large swatches of land, carbon dioxide could be trapped in transformed, scrubbing it from the atmosphere. If this technique, called enhanced weathering, were to be employed around the world, scientists estimate two billion tons of carbon dioxide could be removed from the atmosphere each year.

In a paper published in the journal Nature July 8, researchers at the University of Sheffield laid out the potential costs and impact of the process. If the three countries that emit the most carbon dioxide —China, the United States and India—adopted the practice, one billion metric tons could be scrubbed from the air.”

Read more from Claire Bugos’ article in Smithsonian Magazine here.

The Arctic Is On Fire, and We Should All Be Terrified

“Not that you don’t have a lot on your mind already, but may I suggest one additional topic of alarm for consideration: Siberia is on fire.

Siberia, the proverbial coldest place, situated way up at the top of the globe in the Arctic circle, is experiencing record warm temperatures, melting sea ice, and massive wildfires — changes to the environment that even the scientists most urgently tracking the climate crisis didn’t expect to see for another several decades.”

Read more from Bridget Read of The Cut’s compelling article about our climate crisis here.

200,000 Year-Old City May Rewrite History →

Laura Bradfield of The South African writes, "200 000 Year Old City Found in Southern Africa May Rewrite History."

The great pyramid of Giza is thought to be one of the oldest structures in the world- it’s only 5000 years old. The most ancient structure on earth is reportedly the megalithic temples in Malta, carbon dated to 3500BCE. Right up until now these were known as the first advanced civilizations. Michael Tellinger and Johan Heine have discovered a sight in Mozambique’s Maputo that dates back 200,000 years.

The site is thought to be part of an ancient city that spans 10,000km’s. It has roads joining complex circular structures with agricultural areas which indicate that it belonged to a highly advanced civilization. > Read More