Review
In recent years, there's been much speculation about the various ways in which global warming might affect land, weather, water, wildlife, and even culture, but most of the rhetoric revolves around that keyword, "warming." Few of us have probably stopped to envision what might happen if climate change moved in the other direction. That's exactly what S. D. Crockett has done in her stunning debut novel,
After the Snow, in which she imagines a Britain plunged into darkness and bitter cold.
The year is 2059. At the center of the novel is 15-year-old Willo Blake, who remembers nothing of the world before the ice and snow that characterize the apocalyptic landscape in which he lives. His world is also a brutal one, as a nebulous power structure seizes the city's means of production, and uses bureaucratic barriers and threats of violence (not...
Beyond the Book
Today's climate discussions are often so focused on global warming that it can be easy to forget that dramatic changes in climate, including extensive periods of global cooling, have been a hallmark of earth's history for billions of years. In fact, we're in an ice age right now. Currently, earth is in what's called an interglacial period (an interval of warmer temperatures that occurs between glacial periods within an ice age) of the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation, which began approximately 2.6 million years ago, and cycles between glacial and interglacial periods roughly every 100,000 - 200,000 years.
Seventeenth century astronomer Johannes Kepler was the first to credit the earth's irregular orbit for these cyclical periods of glaciation. Today, contemporary scientists...
