Sublime

was now evident that the joint failure had been initiated at ignition by a failure of the O-rings to seal off in the aft right-hand solid rocket booster field-joint.

The amount of water on the earth is essentially fixed. Almost all of it (some 97 percent) is in the oceans, and almost all of the rest is on the land—in ice and snow (especially the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets), in lakes and rivers, and in groundwater. But as we saw in Chapter 2, the one hundred-thousandth of the earth’s water that resides

The tragedy is likely to play out in two phases: around 2050 to 2060 (depending on the rate of warming), river flows will surge as ice rapidly disintegrates, dramatically increasing the risk of flooding. After the floods subside, droughts will hit hard. The glaciers will finally disappear and, during the summer, rivers will shrivel.