Discover, January 31, 1992

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New Jersey was a very different place a couple of hundred million years ago. Instead of having gentle hills, it was covered by mountains as high as the Rockies, and rather than lying on the eastern edge of North America, it lay snuggled inside the supercontinent known as Pangaea. By that time the giant landmass had begun to pull apart, and rifts had been created among the mountains. Monsoons dumped water on these rifts, and as they filled they formed a series of narrow crescent-shaped lakes, much like today’s Lake Tanganyika. The largest of them all, cutting across New Jersey, is formally known among geologists as Lake Newark. Informally, they call it the Big Blue Banana.

Continue reading “Peeling the Big Blue Banana” →

Discover, January 31, 1992

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Even before the Kuwaiti oil fields began burning, researchers warned that we humans, busy with war, were about to play dice with the biosphere. Rising smoke from a devastated Kuwait, they said, might cause drastic changes in the planet’s weather.

On January 22, when the first oil wells were actually set on fire, Carl Sagan appeared on ABC’s Nightline. “We think the net effects will be very similar to the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815, which resulted in the year 1816 being known as the year without a summer,” he said.

Continue reading “Ecowar” →