The bloody standoff was over in just a couple of seconds. The old wolf lunged at the cow elk’s neck, twisting his jaws at just the right second to deceive the elk about his trajectory. Offered just a glimmer of an opening, he clamped down with fifteen hundred pounds of pressure on her throat. In …
Wrapping Glaciers, Making Clouds, and Reflecting Sunlight
An image in the online Encyclopaedia Britannica illustrating the various strategies for climate engineering has always bothered me. Alongside the highly technical and speculative proposal of placing orbiting mirrors in space to intercept the sun’s rays sits the highly unsophisticated and low-tech proposal of wrapping melting glaciers with huge sheets of white fabric. The juxtaposition …
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Sailing on Oceans of Grass
“Prairie schooners” they called them. The covered wagons that moved across the tallgrass prairie of the American mid-west in the nineteenth century would have revealed no daylight under their carriage. Their wheels would have been completely obscured by grasses and forbs that stood five or six feet high. The only objects visible from afar would …
