Now we are gods: Welcome to the Anthropocene
London: These are epoch-making times. Literally. We are living at an exciting stage in our planet’s 4.5 billion year history; Earth is crossing a geological boundary and we humans are the changemakers.
Geologists are calling it the Anthropocene, ‘the Age of Man’, recognising our species’ ascent to a geophysical force on a par with earth-shattering asteroids and planet-cloaking volcanoes. How we choose to wield this force may determine not simply our own survival, but that of life on Earth.
Earth-changing epochs used to be limited to things like massive volcanic eruptions
“We don’t know what is going to happen in the Anthropocene – it could be good, even better,” Read more…
Patagonia to be dammed
London: Plans for five hydrodams in the wilderness of Patagonia have been approved by environmental regulators appointed by Chile President Sebastian Piñera’s administration. The controversial plans are now expected to be officially signed off by the government council of ministers.
A condor flies over snowy rocks
The dams will stopper the Baker and Pascua rivers in Chilean Patagonia, and the 3MW/yr hydropower generated Read more…
Kittentastic!
London: When the lady from our local cat charity phoned with “an urgent fostering problem”, I probably should have thought about it for longer than a second. Half an hour later, a cardboard box with a black and white stray and her four slug-like kittens turned up.
She's a friendly little thing, still pretty young herself.
Nick was a little surprised to find five cats had moved in by the time he got home from work Read more…
Navel Gazing
London: The Guardian newspaper and Wellcome Trust medical organisation have launched a prize “to celebrate new voices in the ever-growing ecosystem of science writers”.
Several of the organisms in this ecosystem were asked to contribute their thoughts and advice on writing about science (including me) and a comprehensive list of columns by my fellow sci-hacks is steadily building up. Read more…
Learning to stay still
London: Fidgeting burns 10 times as many calories as jogging or going to the gym three times a week. I am reminded of this landmark finding every time someone questions my apparently sedentary lifestyle, which involves lots of eating, no exercise and yet I am not morbidly obese. I like to be moving, doing things, seeing things.
Bus travel in Guatemala
All of which makes my recent transition from travelling the world to working from home in London difficult. Read more…
Damming the Mekong River
London: As we crash headlong through the second decade of the 21st century, the cost of fuel – both economic and environmentally – is soaring. So what better way to meet a developing country’s energy needs than tapping its renewable hydropower resource? The small, landlocked Asian country, Laos, is itching to do just that.
Me at a bamboo fish trap
A policy forum article in the journal Science this week, written by two academics based at Chinese science institutes, looks at ambitious plans for 11 dams along the Mekong river Read more…
The filth and the fury
London: Washed-out, colourless and damply resigned: London is stoically whimpering under this drawn-out economic recession. The season is cloudy and cold with drizzle and a face-smarting wind saps our energy in incremental gusts. Grey and dull shades of browns and blues, their vibrancies muted to stain of Victorian brickwork, dominate, from the miserable business suits that men (and, increasingly, women) choose to wear, to the shape-muffling ‘sports’-wear, jeans and jumpers and black black coats.
Lewisham regeneration underway
St Pauls Cathedral and 'the Gherkin' from Waterloo Bridge
Travelling by train through the cluttered concrete of community housing, tower blocks and failed estates, London appears ugly, a symptom of its unplanned sprawling growth from a small Roman core, founded 2000 years ago. Read more…
Back home
London: I’m writing this, sitting by a radiator in the streaming sunshine with a large cup of Earl Grey tea in my hand – yes, I’m back in London.
It’s very cold here, although, disconcertingly, everyone keeps telling me what a lovely warm spell we’re having, Read more…
Journey’s end
Tulum: And so here we are at the end of this journey – 5000 miles from London, where it all started, but we’ll do the final push from Mexico by plane.
Wandering around the world and all the way to Mexico
We’re finishing on the white-gold sands of Tulum, a stunning wild beach on the Yucatán’s Caribbean coast, where we’ve rented a stick and thatch cabin a few metres from the ocean. At night, the huge supermoon Read more…
City on the edge of the magic well
Valladolid: The Mayans recognised two distinct types of natural wells in their parch-dry Yucatán lands. One, which they called a dzonot (bastardised into ‘cenote’ by the Spanish) are the round sinkholes made from collapsed limestone caves fed by underground rivers; a ch’e'en, however, is a steep-sided well made during the 65 million years ago meteorite impact here, when large rocks were flung out from the central crater creating an arc of ch’e'ens.
Dzibnup cenote
Cenotes usually have the remnants of a former cave system over the well, Read more…
