Under a White Sky

Old River Control Auxiliary Structure

During the first few months of 2020, a vast, unsupervised experiment took place. As the coronavirus raged, billions of people were ordered to stay home. At the peak of the lockdown, in April, global CO2 emissions were down an estimated seventeen percent compared with the comparable period the previous year. This drop—the largest recorded ever—was i

Scientists are still trying to puzzle out what caused the wild temperature swings first glimpsed in the Camp Century core. One hypothesis is that they are related to a loss of sea ice in the Arctic, which is worrisome, given that global warming is causing a loss of sea ice in the Arctic. But even putting aside the possibility of a human-induced D–O

No one can say exactly how hot the world can get before out-and-out disaster—the inundation of a populous country like Bangladesh, say, or the collapse of crucial ecosystems like coral reefs—becomes inevitable. Officially, the threshold of catastrophe is an average global temperature rise of 2°C (3.6°F). Virtually every nation signed on to this fig

How were two million people going to live in a region that was sinking into oblivion? The losses were particularly acute, he noted, in their own backyard. The area around Plaquemines had already shrunk by some seven hundred square miles. “We’re in an uphill battle against sea-level rise and subsidence,” Barth said. CPRA would continue to drill and

the ice sheet’s surface. That summer—a record-breaker—Greenland shed almost six hundred billion tons of ice, producing enough water to fill a pool the size of California to a depth of four feet.

One way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very, very big. The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth. No one wept for them, and, eventually, new speci

Project Iceworm was an exceptionally cold plan to win the Cold War. The Army proposed boring hundreds of miles of tunnels into Greenland’s ice sheet. These would be outfitted with rail lines, and nuclear missiles would be shuttled along the tracks to keep the Soviets guessing. “Iceworm thus couples mobility with dispersion, concealment, and hardnes

A few years ago, a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, announced that he had produced the world’s first CRISPR-edited humans—twin baby girls. According to He, the girls’ genes had been tweaked to confer resistance to HIV, though whether this is actually the case remains unclear. Shortly after he made the announcement, He was placed under house arrest in