The circumstances that ended the last ice age, somewhere between 19,000 and 10,000 years ago, have been unclear. In particular, scientists aren’t sure how carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, played into the giant melt. New research indicates it did in fact help drive this prehistoric episode of global warming, even though it did not kick…
As the seas rise, so will the costs associated with them. The impact of climate change on oceans alone could cost $2 trillion by the end of the century, according to a report by the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden. That figure comes from a scenario in which Earth’s temperature rises 4 °C by 2100,…
Extended space travel can cause eye and brain abnormalities in astronauts, researchers have found. For the study, published online in the journal Radiology, investigators used MRI scans to examine the eyes and brains of 27 astronauts who spent an average of 108 days in space aboard the space shuttle and/or the International Space Station. Eight…
The first plants to appear on earth 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages by causing a reduction in atmospheric carbon, British researchers said. Scientists say the first plants to grow on land, the ancestors of mosses that grow today, had a dramatic impact on the global carbon cycle and the world’s…
At the end of the Cretaceous period some 65 million years ago, an asteroid slammed into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, causing severe but selective extinction. While that is widely accepted, it has remained unclear exactly what the mechanisms were that caused extinction of ocean-dwelling organisms. Proposed explanations include global darkness due to blocking of sunlight with…
The Amazon rainforest is in flux, thanks to agricultural expansion and climate change. In other words, humans have “become important agents of disturbance in the Amazon Basin,” as an international consortium of scientists wrote in a review of the state of the science on the world’s largest rainforest published in the journal Nature. The dry…
What is the lifetime of our communicative civilization? Will our civilization make it through the 21st century intact? Is there a “Great Filter” of self-destruction that limits the life expectancy of intelligent life in the universe?
We can best work toward addressing and solving the Big Problems related to food, population, water, energy, the environment, economics, education, and war by discussing them in the context of Big History.
From the 2009 Terry Lectures at Yale University by Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel Primack.