A Journey Through the History of Climate Change
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Listen to the Episode: More than 4,000 years ago, a wall seems to have gone up across what is now northern Iraq. It may have been over 200 kilometers long – more than the distance between New York and Philadelphia; just a little less than the distance from Paris to Brussels. It appears to have […]
Listen to the Episode: In the heart of the Sahara Desert, along the western edge of the Aïr Massif (air mah-SEEF), there is an archaeological site, known as Gobero, that dates back to the very dawn of the Holocene, 11,700 years ago. There are skeletons under the sands of Gobero – skeletons in what may […]
Listen to the Episode: Along the northwestern fringe of Greenland, there is a vast dome of ice, sloping above the rugged crust until it’s taller than the Empire State Building. Prudhoe Dome, as it’s called, belongs to the Greenland Ice Sheet. Standing atop its windswept surface, peering out at an endless white horizon, it feels […]
Listen to the Episode: A woman, not more than twenty years old, steps onto a ramshackle platform: tree trunks and branches, bound together, edging into a lake. The Sun has just begun to climb above the horizon. As she picks her way over the logs, the woman’s hand grazes a thicket of reeds along the […]
Listen to the Episode: In 1877, an astronomer saw the impossible: a network of lines, crisscrossing Mars. Two decades later, many believed those lines were canals. Mars was widely thought to be older than Earth, and scientists had concluded that planets dried out as they aged. It seemed as though an alien civilization had built […]
Listen to the Episode: Sometime around the year 600 BCE, the story goes, a legendary Athenian statesman named Solon traveled to the capital of ancient Egypt. Along the steamy banks of the Nile, he sought out the priests of Neith, a goddess in the Egyptian pantheon who was, supposedly, as old as time itself. Solon […]
Listen to the Episode: Some 13,000 years ago, the Pleistocene world was warming – fast. Average global temperatures had soared by more than three degrees Celsius since the chilliest point of the Last Glacial Maximum, around 7,000 years earlier. Ice sheets were in headlong retreat, and meltwater flowing into the ocean had helped raise sea […]
Listen to the Episode: Around 50,000 years ago, Mandrin Cave was a lonely place. Hollowed out of a limestone cliff, the cave overlooked the Rhône Valley in southern France. The valley, now a lush, rolling landscape of vineyards and orchards, was then cold and bleak. A small band of Neanderthals, numbering no more than 30, […]
Listen to the Episode: Several years ago, researchers installed hidden speakers and motion-activated cameras around watering holes in South Africa’s Greater Kruger National Park. As elephants, impalas, hyenas, and other animals approached to drink, the researchers played a variety of sounds to observe their reactions. As you can imagine, many animals fled when they heard […]
Listen to the Episode: Around 75,000 years ago, two super-volcanic eruptions quite literally shook the Earth. First, the Atitlán caldera in present-day Guatemala exploded with the force of one trillion tons of TNT. To put that in perspective, that’s about 330 times more energy than could be unleashed by all of the world’s nuclear weapons […]
