Sublime

In the twentieth century, the biodiversity crisis, as it eventually came to be known, only sped up. Extinction rates are now hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times higher than the so-called background rates that applied over most of geological time. The losses extend across all continents, all oceans, and all taxa. Along with the species formally cate

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Arádottir had brought along a rock core to show me the end result. The core, which was roughly two feet long and a couple of inches in diameter, was the dark color of the lava fields. But the black rock—basalt—was pocked with little holes, and these holes were filled with a chalky white compound—calcium carbonate. The white deposits represented, if

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Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled “global change” that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth’s history, the most recent being the asteroi

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