Chemical Archive

Via John Maas, who sent me to BLDBLG, as I tossed & turned sleeplessly in an overheated Hyatt Hotel in Buffalo, NY — after an excellent late afternoon/evening reading sequences at the &Now Conference by Shelley Jackson and Steve McCaffery, followed by a superb “keynote” address by Rikki Ducornet who took us from whale pods spotted off the Northwest Coast to Enkidu & Sumerian forest devastation, to biology curios seen at eight to… I can’t wait to see that piece published. Meanwhile here the opening paras of the Chemical archive post; you can read the rest here.

Chemical Archive

As the world’s glaciers melt, they’ve begun to release an archive of banned industrial substances back into the environment, chemicals that have been locked, frozen, inside the glacial ice for up to thirty years.

According to Discovery, “many persistent pollutants, including PCBs, dioxins and several chlorine-containing pesticides [such as] DDT” have begun to leach out from melting glaciers in places like Switzerland.

The idea of a poisonous atmospheric archive being unintentionally released—on a global scale—makes me wonder what sorts of news reports we might read in several thousand years’ time, when carbon tombs start to leak their quarantined contents back into the atmosphere. The buried skies of an industrial era, put to pharaonic rest beneath the earth’s surface, will make their operatic reappearance in future human history.

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