Under a White Sky

The Great Barrier Reef might be thought of as the ultimate “entangled bank.” Tens of millions of years of evolution have gone into its creation, with the result that even a fist-sized piece of it is unfathomably dense with life, crammed with creatures “dependent on each other in so complex a manner” that biologists will probably never fully master

As with temperatures, sea levels have in the past varied dramatically. At the end of the Wisconsin, as the great ice sheets were breaking up, there were periods when they rose at the astonishing rate of a foot a decade. (It’s been proposed that one of these “meltwater pulses” inspired the account of the deluge in Genesis.) Obviously, our ancestors

Just as there are lots of ways to add CO2 to the air, there are lots of ways—potentially—to remove it. A technique known as “enhanced weathering” is a sort of upside-down version of the project I toured at the Hellisheiði Power Station. Instead of injecting CO2 deep into rock, the idea is to bring the rock up to the surface to meet the CO2. Basalt

“The current Arctic is experiencing rates of warming comparable to abrupt changes, or D–O events, recorded in Greenland ice cores,” a team of Danish and Norwegian scientists recently reported. Since the melt process is self-reinforcing—water is dark and absorbs sunlight, while ice is light-colored and reflects it—there’s widespread concern that Gre

Native Americans were living in the delta even as it was being created. Their strategy for dealing with the river’s vagaries, as far as archaeologists have been able to determine, was one of accommodation. When the Mississippi flooded, they sought higher ground. When it shifted quarters, they did, too.

Compounding the dangers of warming were profound changes in ocean chemistry. Corals thrive in alkaline waters, but fossil-fuel emissions were making the seas more acidic. One team of researchers calculated that a few more decades of rising emissions would cause reefs to “stop growing and begin dissolving.” Another group predicted that, by the middl

Cane toads are native to South America, Central America, and the very southernmost tip of Texas. In the mid-1800s, they were imported to the Caribbean. The idea was to enlist the toads in the battle against beetle grubs, which were plaguing the region’s cash crop—sugar cane. (Sugar cane, too, is an imported species; it is native to New Guinea.) Fro

For the last few decades, the weapon of choice against invasive rodents has been Brodifacoum, an anticoagulant that induces internal hemorrhaging. Brodifacoum can be incorporated into bait and then dispensed from feeders, or it can be spread by hand, or dropped from the air. (First you ship a species around the world, then you poison it from helico

One way to gloss the Camp Century story is as another Anthropocene allegory. Man sets out to “conquer his environment.” He congratulates himself for his resourcefulness and derring-do, only to find the walls closing in. Drive out nature with a snowblower, yet she will always hurry back.