Titan’s upper atmosphere is a nonstop factory of complex organics, which both shroud this world in its permanent smoggy haze and snow down on the icy surface. There they gather in vast dune fields tha...
The scientific revolution has revealed us, as individuals, to be incredibly tiny and ephemeral, and our entire existence, not just as individuals but even as a species, to be brief and insubstantial a...
The idea arose when Dan Rothman, a geochemist at MIT, was studying the graphs showing changes in the carbon cycle at the time of the Great Dying. He noticed something about the shape of the curves. He...
The Big Five extinctions are simply slightly more intense than the sixth- or seventh-largest declines, and you could just as easily discuss the Big Seven or Big Ten, depending on how you sliced up the...
The Anthropocene represents a braiding together of these into one inseparable narrative. This is the end of history, and of biology and geology—at least as separate stories. Have they become irreversi...
One of the more extreme claims of the Gaia camp, at present neither proven nor refuted, is that the influence of life over the eons has helped Earth hold on to her life-giving water, while Venus and M...
Gazing over the countless fluctuations and transformations in Earth’s multibillion-year history, I am struck by the unique strangeness of the present moment. We suddenly find ourselves sort of running...
Cassie comes across as serious and studious, but once, after dinner in Washington with a group of NASA people, I asked her if her job title invited a lot of Men in Black questions. With little provoca...
This way, we’ve changed the geometry of the planet. Before we came along, the world was discontinuous. Oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges formed impenetrable barriers, breaking Earth into separate r...
The TTAPS study and the wider debate it ignited helped drive home the absurdity of nuclear strategies dependent on massive deterrence. The United States and the USSR had created a situation where even...
Now nearly circular, compared to other epochs, where it is slightly more egg-shaped—we inhabit an interglacial of exceptionally long duration. Models incorporating this fact suggest that, even without...
The exact kill mechanisms are still being worked out, but the chronology has now convincingly implicated the volcanic culprit. At just the precise geological moment when most species suddenly dropped...
Since, as I’ve indicated, we don’t fully understand the mechanism by which the orbital Milanković forcing causes large climate swings, there is a lot of uncertainty here. The last warm interglacial be...
Most of the evidence uncovered by Galileo would have been discovered by a similar fly-by spacecraft as long ago as about 2 billion years. In contrast, modulated radio transmissions could not have been...
Less than eighty years later, we know all these ideas about origins (of Earth, the planets, the Moon, and mountain ranges) to be completely wrong. We’re certainly not any smarter today than they were...
Here, I find it useful to point out the distinction between cleverness and wisdom. Cleverness is the ability to solve problems through invention and innovation. We’ve got that in spades. Wisdom is the...
Is. I think our fundamental Anthropocene dilemma is that we have achieved global impact but have no mechanisms for global self-control. So, to the (debatable) extent that we are like some kind of glob...
For the first time ever the majority of children being born today will never in their lives directly see the Milky Way galaxy. The cosmic connection has never been closer or more remote. Age
Climate scientist Ray Pierrehumbert, one of the coauthors on the recent National Research Council report on geoengineering by solar radiation management,9 put it, trying to do this anytime soon would...
While ruthlessly aggressive toward other species, they are also unusually cooperative with their own kind. Ants from neighboring nests don’t fight, as with other species,