Climate: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 3

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Q1871

WonderArchitecture

Chand Baori descends through thousands of tightly ordered steps to seasonal water, turning storage, shade and access into monumental geometry.

Built at Abhaneri from around the ninth century, the stepwell stages descent as both utility and spectacle. Repeated flights give many people a route to water as its level rises and falls, while depth and stone mass offer refuge from severe heat. The geometry makes seasonal change readable: each terrace marks another possible waterline, and every turn of the stair keeps access working as the well empties or fills.

Chand BaoriRead card

Q1872

WonderArchitecture

The walled city of Shibam in Yemen gathers multi-storey mud-brick tower houses into one of the world's earliest and densest experiments in vertical urban living.

Many surviving towers date from the sixteenth century onward and rise as high as seven storeys within a compact defensive wall. Narrow plots push rooms upward; party walls, shaded lanes and closely packed entrances compress a city into limited ground. Height here is an urban answer to enclosure: families, circulation and storage stack vertically so the settlement can grow without spilling beyond its fortified edge.

Old Walled City of ShibamRead card

Q1878

StillnessArchitecture

Mashrabiya latticework filters glare, encourages airflow and lets occupants look outward with greater privacy, making climate control part of an intricate façade.

Its turned wooden elements break hard sun into patterned shade while openings admit moving air. Traditional projecting forms can extend the room towards the street without surrendering the interior to every passing gaze; porous earthenware water jars placed nearby could add evaporative cooling. The beauty is inseparable from performance. Mashrabiya makes a building boundary less like a wall and more like a careful conversation.

MashrabiyaRead card

Q1973

WonderClimate

In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote reported that a cylinder rich in carbon dioxide heated more strongly in sunlight and stayed warm longer than ordinary air.

Foote compared gases in paired cylinders fitted with thermometers, set them in sunlight and recorded their temperatures. She reasoned that an atmosphere with more carbon dioxide would give Earth a higher temperature. Joseph Henry presented her paper at a scientific meeting rather than Foote herself. Her apparatus did not isolate the infrared mechanism later measured by John Tyndall, but her conclusion that more atmospheric carbon dioxide could mean a warmer Earth was strikingly prescient.

Eunice Newton FooteRead card

Q2011

WonderOcean

Thousands of autonomous Argo floats repeatedly descend and rise through the ocean, measuring temperature, salinity and pressure before surfacing to transmit open data by satellite.

A typical Core Argo float drifts deep for days, sinks towards about 2,000 metres, then profiles the water as it rises. At the surface it sends measurements and position to satellites before diving again, usually completing a cycle in roughly ten days. Distributed across the world's oceans, the fleet has turned vast, rarely visited water into a continuously renewed climate record available to everyone.

Argo (oceanography)Read card

Q2061

WonderScience

In January 2025, a European team drilling at Little Dome C in Antarctica reached bedrock 2,800 metres down, recovering a continuous ice record spanning at least 1.2 million years — snow that fell long before our species existed.

Each layer holds bubbles of the actual air of its era, so the core is a direct archive of ancient atmospheres — and may explain why the planet's ice-age rhythm mysteriously slowed around a million years ago. The cores travelled to Europe at minus fifty degrees aboard an icebreaker, and laboratories across ten countries began reading them; the deepest, disturbed metres may prove older still. Somewhere in a freezer sits weather from before humanity.

Beyond EPICARead card