The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record

The Atlantic was founded in 1857, primarily to forward the abolition of slavery, by a team of intellectuals that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier, and now features articles on a variety of subjects by leading writers.  I encourage readers to make the investment of time I just did to read an article on paleoclimatology in this month’s edition, whose title is above.

Yes, “the Earth’s climate is always changing,” as those ignorant of the basic science like to say, in defense of the incorrect notion that rising temperatures are independent of human activity.  Yet there is so much more to this, as laid out by award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen, whose work has also appeared in the Guardian, Wired, New York Times, Washington Post and Slate.

Learn about the driving factors that have meant the difference between sweltering Arctic rainforests (replete with gigantic camels) and places like modern-day Boston, which was once covered by a half mile of ice. Human civilization is about 9,000 years old, the blink of an eye in geological history, but even this brief moment has seen incredible climatic instability, which has wrought terrible destruction to the things we’ve created over these few millennia.

It’s a wild ride.

Photo Illustrations, including the one above, by Brendan Pattengale