Sublime

Lahontan

There have been five mass extinctions during which at least 50% of the known species on the planet have died. Though we are not clear on all the contributing factors, each of these extinctions were driven in part by a fundamental change in the Earth’s climate. Most recent was the End Cretaceous extinction, 66 million years ago, when either an

“If we can extend the life of the reef by twenty, thirty years, that might be just enough for the world to get its act together on emissions, and it might make the difference between having nothing and having some sort of functional reef,” Hardisty told me. “I mean, it’s really sad that we have to talk like that. But that’s where we are now.”

Climate change was pushing ocean temperatures beyond many species’ tolerance. In 1998, a so-called global bleaching event, caused by a spike in water temperatures, killed more than fifteen percent of corals worldwide. Another global bleaching event took place in 2010. Then, in 2014, a marine heat wave set in and didn’t let up for almost three

In a world of synthetic gene drives, the border between the human and the natural, between the laboratory and the wild, already deeply blurred, all but dissolves. In such a world, not only do people determine the conditions under which evolution is taking place, people can—again, in principle—determine the outcome.

This, the most widely distributed tree in North America with close kin on three continents, all at once feels unbearably rare. She