Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

“The electric-field strength is increasing as you move from upstream to downstream or vice versa, so if my hand were a fish, its nose is here,” he continued, indicating the tip of his middle finger, “and its tail is here.” He pointed to the base of his palm, then set the outstretched hand wiggling. “What happens is, the fish is swimming in, and its nose is experiencing one electrical voltage, and its tail is experiencing another. That’s what makes the current actually flow through the body. It’s the current flowing through a fish that will shock them or electrocute them. So a big fish has a big voltage difference from its nose to its tail. A smaller fish doesn’t have that much distance for the voltage to cover, so the shock is smaller.”

“For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun,” Aldo Leopold noted in an essay commemorating the passenger pigeon’s passing.

The Great Barrier Reef isn’t a reef so much as a collection of reefs—some three thousand in all—that stretches over one hundred thirty-five thousand square miles, an area larger than Italy.

How reefs support so much diversity under such austere conditions has long puzzled scientists—a conundrum that’s become known as “Darwin’s paradox.”

The Odin, in Oakland, California, is a company that sells genetic-engineering kits.

This is the situation of the Devils Hole pupfish, the Shoshone pupfish, and the Pahrump poolfish, of the northern quoll, the Campbell Island teal, and the Tristan albatross. Stick to a strict interpretation of the natural and these—along with thousands of other species—are goners. The issue, at this point, is not whether we’re going to alter nature, but to what end?

The Volcanic Explosivity Index was developed in the 1980s as sort of a cousin to the Richter scale. The index runs from zero, for a gentle burp of an eruption, to eight, for a “mega-colossal,” epoch-making catastrophe. Like its better-known relative, the VEI is logarithmic, so, for example, an eruption has a magnitude of four if it produces more than a hundred million cubic meters of ejecta and a magnitude of five if it produces more than a billion. In recorded history, there have been only a handful of magnitude sevens (a hundred billion cubic meters) and no eruptions of magnitude eight. Among the sevens, the most recent—and, hence, the best chronicled—is the eruption of Mount Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa. Tambora fired its first warning shots on the evening of April 5, 1815. People across the region reported hearing loud booms, which they attributed to cannon fire. Five days later, the mountain issued a column of smoke and lava that reached a height of twenty-five miles. Ten thousand people were killed more or less immediately—burned to cinders by the clouds of molten rock and searing vapor that raced down the slopes.

Never heard of this volcano!

The best method for delivering aerosols would probably be via airplane. The plane would need to be capable of reaching an altitude of around sixty thousand feet and of carrying a payload on the order of twenty tons. Researchers who looked into the configuration of such a craft, which they dubbed a Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Lofter, or SAIL, concluded that development costs would run to about $2.5 billion. This may sound like a lot of money, but it’s only about a tenth of what Airbus spent to develop its “superjumbo” A380, a plane it stopped producing after a dozen years.

This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.