On This Day: May 31, 1930
Inside the Bold Geoengineering Work to Refreeze the Arctic’s Disappearing Ice
May 30, 2025
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A haze of ice crystals in the air created a halo around the low sun as three snowmobiles thundered onto the sea ice on a February morning in far northern Canada. Wisps of snow blew across the white expanse. It was –26 degrees Celsius as we left Cambridge Bay, an Inuit village in a vast archipelago of treeless islands and ice-choked channels. This temperature was relatively warm, six degrees C above average. The winter had been the mildest in 75 years. The sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean was at its smallest extent on record. Scientists predict that within the next 15 years, this ice cap will disappear in summer for the first time in millennia, accelerating global warming. The U.K. company Real Ice, whose heavily bundled team was bouncing around on the other two snowmobiles ahead of mine, hopes to prevent that outcome with an effort that has been called extremely ambitious, insane, or even dangerous.
At a spot seven kilometers from the village, Real Ice co-founder Cían Sherwin, an Irishman with a red beanie and scraggy goatee, hopped off his snowmobile and started drilling with a long electric auger. A gob of water and frozen shavings sloshed up and out of the hole as he punctured the underside of the ice more than a meter below. Inuit guide David Kavanna widened the opening with a spearlike ice saw, then placed a wood box around it. Sherwin lowered an aluminum pump, which looked like a large coffee urn attached to a curved rubber hose, through the hole. He plugged a cable into a battery pack. After a few seconds, water began pouring out of the hose, spilling onto the ice in an ethereal shade of blue. As it congeals, “the water acts almost like lava,” Sherwin said. “The ice formation starts almost instantly.”
Thin, broad sheets of ice expand from the ice cap’s edges in winter, when it’s dark and cold, and melt away in summer, when the sun shines 24 hours a day. The ice acts like a giant mirror, reflecting up to 90 percent of the sun’s radiation back toward space. Ocean water, in contrast, absorbs 90 percent of sunlight. The ice cap’s core of so-called multiyear ice, which persists year-round, has shrunk by about 40 percent in four decades, kicking off a vicious cycle: as more ice melts, more ocean water is exposed, and that water warms further, melting even more ice. If the ice starts disappearing entirely in summer, global temperatures could rise an extra 0.19 degrees C by 2050.
Real Ice is trying to thicken seasonal ice so it lasts longer into the warm months, keeping the planet cool. Sherwin hopes pumping could someday refreeze a million square kilometers of both seasonal and multiyear ice—an area the size of Texas and New Mexico combined and about a fifth of what’s now left in summer—to stop the ice cap’s death spiral. All it would take, Real Ice says, is half a million ice-making robots.
Polar geoengineering on such an enormous scale could help slow warming until the world finally weans itself off coal, oil, and natural gas. Many scientists think it will never work. The researchers at Real Ice argue we no longer have any option but to try; studies suggest that even slashing fossil-fuel use may not save summertime sea ice. “It’s sad that it’s ended up that way, but we’ve got to do something about it,” Sherwin said to me out on the frozen plain. “Emissions reduction is just not enough anymore.”Cambridge Bay, which British explorers named for a 19th-century Duke of Cambridge, is a town of 1,800 mostly Inuit inhabitants located across from the Canadian mainland on Victoria Island, one of the world’s largest islands. When I landed at the one-room airport on a twin-engine turboprop, I was greeted by a stuffed musk ox and a placard about the 1845 British naval expedition of John Franklin. Cambridge Bay lies along the Northwest Passage, an icy sea route between Europe and Asia sought by explorers for 400 years. Franklin’s two ships, Erebus and Terror, were trapped in the polar sea ice that surges down toward Cambridge Bay in winter, buckling into ridges up to 10 meters high. All 129 men onboard died of cold, starvation, or disease. These days, cruise ships coast through the passage every year, often visiting the grave sites of Franklin expedition members.
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A team with Real Ice prepares to drill through sea ice in the Canadian Arctic, having already flooded a nearby patch (darker blue) to thicken it. Taylor Roades
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The price of Christianity’s “broken bargain” with democracy
May 30, 2025
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Over glasses of merlot in 2003, the journalist Jonathan Rauch was asked about his religious beliefs. He nearly answered “atheist,” then paused.
God never made sense to Rauch. As a child in Hebrew school, he went through the motions but was unable to believe. In his teens, he heard pastors on AM radio rail against gay people like himself, calling them “a stench in the nostril of God.” His atheism hardened.
But now, sipping wine in his early 40s, the idea of calling himself an “atheist” seemed to imply he still cared about religion one way or the other. He hadn’t for years. Then it hit him: “I’m … an apatheist!” he replied, getting a chuckle.
Rauch told that story in a 2003 essay published in The Atlantic. His essay celebrated the decline of religion in American life, pointing to falling church attendance and broad changes not so much in what Americans believed but how: with a shrug, increasingly. Calling religion “the most divisive and volatile of social forces,” Rauch was heartened that religion seemed to be losing its grip on American public life.
“I believe that the rise of apatheism,” he wrote, “is to be celebrated as nothing less than a major civilizational advance.”
Today, Rauch calls that essay “the dumbest thing” he’s ever written. His latest book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, sets out to correct it.
Cross Purposes is no come-to-Jesus moment for Rauch. It is humbly meant to be one for, well, Christians — especially white evangelicals, who, Rauch argues, have become misaligned with the virtues of Christ, and therefore misaligned with the virtues that liberalism (in the classical sense) depends on.
The book is also intended to be a wake-up call for nonbelievers like Rauch who have underappreciated Christianity’s role in “stabilizing” America’s liberal democracy, a role the Founders wrote about centuries ago.
So, Rauch writes, secular America should greet religion not with apathy but arms wide open. “We should even, perhaps, cherish religion.”
Christianity’s crisis
Cross Purposes argues that Christianity is in crisis, both in numbers and spirit. Drawing on interviews with pastors and analyses from previous books on religion in America, the book diagnoses the problem in two broad ways: Churches are “thinning” (losing members and distinctiveness from the outside world), while some are also “sharpening” (becoming politicized, partisan, confrontational, and divisive).
The trouble started decades ago when Protestant churches made decisions that caused them to become more secularized and politicized. First, the mainline churches aligned themselves with the center-left progressivism of the mid-20th century, focusing less on theology and more on issues like poverty and civil rights. Then, in the late 1970s, white evangelical churches and the Republican party formed an alliance with each side believing it had something to gain: Christian-friendly policies and a loyal voting bloc, respectively.
These shifts had different motivations but a similar effect: Churches became more open to the influence of external culture as Christians focused less on scripture and more on worldly issues.
“The mainline ecumenical churches and the more conservative evangelical churches are, for different reasons, too secular to really distinguish themselves from the outside cultural and political world,” Rauch tells Big Think.
(Rauch has put it like this: People can do good deeds or talk politics on their own time, so why give up their Sunday mornings?)
As churches drifted away from theology, Christians drifted away from churches. From 2000 to 2020, the share of Americans identifying as “practicing Christians” dropped by nearly half. Today, “nones” — an amorphous group that spans from zealous atheists to the vaguely spiritual — account for nearly 30% of the American population, an all-time high representing a cohort larger than all American evangelicals.
Christianity’s rapid decline caught most by surprise.
“I don’t think in 2003 we had any idea how rapid and dramatic the next 20 years would be,” Rauch says. “It’s really unprecedented.”
The early 21st century saw another collapse, too: Americans’ trust in institutions, politics, democracy, and each other (a deterioration reflected in rising rates of affective polarization, where people view opposing political tribes with growing hostility while viewing theirs more favorably).
These declines happened concurrently but not purely coincidentally, according to Rauch. As churches became less able to provide people with a sense of meaning, transcendence, and identity, many Americans filled the void with politics.
“And that’s an absolutely terrible place to get your sense of identity,” Rauch says.
The apatheism argument assumed Christianity’s fall would make American society less divisive, and that the secular world would build something more stable and enlightened atop the rubble of churches.
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pozdeevvs / Adobe Stock / Jacob Hege / Big Think
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Samuel L. Gravely Jr., First Black Officer in United States Navy Aboard a Fighting Ship
May 30, 2025
Mitochondria Are More Than Powerhouses—They’re the Motherboard of the Cell
May 29, 2025
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I always wanted to understand life. What moves us? What allows us to heal and thrive? And what goes wrong when we get sick or when we eventually stop breathing and die? My search for answers to these stupendously ambitious questions led me, it now seems inexorably, to mitochondria.
In biology classes from high school through university, I learned that mitochondria are little objects that reside within each cell and serve as “powerhouses,” combining oxygen and food to yield energy for the body. This idea of mitochondria being little batteries with a built-in charger, about as interesting as the one in my phone, left me unprepared for the vital reality of these organelles when I first saw them under a microscope in 2011. They were luminous because of a glowing dye I had put in them, and they were dynamic—constantly moving, stretching, morphing, touching one another. They were beautiful. That night, a graduate student alone in a dark laboratory in Newcastle upon Tyne in England, I became a mitochondriac: hooked on mitochondria.
A profound insight by biologist Lynn Margulis helped me make some sense of what I was seeing. She postulated in 1967 that mitochondria descend from a bacterium that was engulfed by a larger ancestral cell about 1.5 billion years ago. Instead of consuming this tidbit, the larger cell let it continue living within. Margulis called this event endosymbiosis, which means, roughly, “living or working together from the inside.” The host cell had no energy source that used oxygen, which, thanks to plants, was already abundant in the atmosphere; mitochondria filled this gap. The unlikely union allowed cells to communicate and cooperate and let their awareness expand beyond their own boundaries, enabling a more complex future in the form of multicellular animals. Mitochondria made cells social, binding them in a contract whereby the survival of each cell depends on every other one, and thus made us possible.
Amazingly, my co-workers and I have discovered that mitochondria are themselves social beings. At least, they foreshadow sociality. Like the bacterium they descended from, they have a life cycle: old ones die out, and new ones are born out of existing ones. Communities of these organelles live within each cell, usually clustered around the nucleus. Mitochondria communicate, both within their own cells and among other cells, reaching out to support one another in times of need and generally helping the community flourish. They produce the heat that keeps our bodies warm. They receive signals about aspects of the environment in which we live, such as air pollution levels and stress triggers, and then integrate this information and emit signals such as molecules that regulate processes within the cell and, indeed, throughout the body.
When our mitochondria thrive, so do we. When they malfunction—when, for instance, their ability to change energy into forms required for biochemical reactions is impaired—we may experience conditions as diverse as diabetes, cancer, autism, and neurodegenerative disorders. And as mitochondria accumulate defects over a lifetime of stress and other insults, they contribute to aging and, ultimately, death. To understand these processes—to see how to sustain physical and mental health—it helps to understand how energy moves through our bodies and minds. That requires a deeper look into mitochondria and their social lives.
Long before I got my first glimpse of mitochondria, I had boned up on the basics of their structure and biology. We inherit our mitochondria from our mother—from the egg cell, to be precise. Mitochondria have their own DNA, which consists of only 37 genes, compared with the thousands of genes in the spiraling chromosomes inside the cell nucleus. This ring of mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, is sheltered within two membranes. The outer shell, shaped like the skin of a sausage, encases the mitochondrion and selectively allows molecules to enter or exit. The inner membrane is made of densely packed proteins and has many folds, called cristae, which serve as a site for chemical reactions, much like the plates suspended inside a battery.
Rather than being like battery chargers, mitochondria are more like the motherboard of the cell.
In the 1960s, British biochemists Peter Mitchell and Jennifer Moyle discovered how electrons derived from carbon in food combine with oxygen in the cristae, releasing a spark of energy that is captured as a gradient in electrical voltage across the membrane. This voltage provides the driving force for all processes in the body and brain, from warming to manufacturing molecules to thinking. Mitochondria also produce a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, which serves as a portable unit of energy that powers hundreds of biochemical reactions within each cell.
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Jennifer N.R. Smith
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What’s Next for Trump’s Tariff Agenda After Back-and-Forth Court Rulings
May 29, 2025
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A series of court rulings have thrown the centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s economic agenda into chaos by first blocking the bulk of his sweeping tariffs and then allowing them to resume, at least for now.
Here’s what to know about where the legal battle stands, and where it could go from here.
What have the courts ruled?
Trump was handed a win on Thursday when a federal appeals court ruled in favor of his Administration and paused a Wednesday night ruling from the U.S. Court of International Trade, allowing his tariffs to remain in place for the time being.
A three-judge panel for the trade court had ruled that the President does not have “unbounded authority” to issue tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The 1977 law, which Trump drew on to levy tariffs against almost every country in the world under national emergencies related to fentanyl and trade deficits, enables the President to oversee economic transactions in the case of a national emergency, such as during an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the economy, foreign policy, or national security.
The ruling halted a 30% tariff on China, a 25% tariff on certain goods from Mexico and Canada, and 10% baseline tariffs on most of the rest of the world, but did not affect import taxes on steel, aluminum, or automakers, which Trump levied under a different law.
The Administration swiftly appealed, and the Thursday decision to grant its emergency motion has temporarily reinstated the tariffs that were halted while the appeals court considers the case.
Adding to the confusion of the back-and-forth rulings, a federal judge issued a ruling in a separate case earlier on Thursday to bar the Trump Administration from collecting tariffs imposed under IEEPA from two Illinois educational toy companies, but paused his injunction for two weeks. The Administration has appealed that decision as well.
What comes next?
The future of Trump’s tariffs is still in limbo. The appeals court directed the plaintiffs in the case, a group comprised of U.S. businesses affected by the tariffs, to respond to federal officials’ motion to stay the trade court’s ruling by June 5. The federal government must then respond by June 9.
The appeals process could ultimately reach as far as the Supreme Court, where the Trump Administration had previously said it would pursue “emergency relief” should the lower court not reinstate the President’s tariff powers.
The levies Trump has imposed under IEEPA have also been challenged in several other lawsuits.
Prior to the reinstatement of the blocked tariffs, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at a press briefing on Thursday that the President had “other legal authorities” he could use to impose import taxes on foreign countries.
Leavitt did not specify further, but the U.S. Court of International Trade itself named another law that grants the President limited power to impose tariffs in its ruling. Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, it noted, allows the President to levy tariffs of up to 15% for as long as 150 days in response to “fundamental international payment problems,” including “large and serious balance-of-payments deficits,” and unfair trading practices.
Trump has himself used other laws to impose import taxes in both of his terms. His steel, aluminum, and auto tariffs, for instance, draw on his authority under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which empowers the President to put tariffs in place in response to national security threats.
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U.S. Court of International Trade in New York City, August 22, 2022.Getty Images
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Larger, More Dangerous Hail Is Becoming More Common—Here’s Why
May 28, 2025
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Hail the size of grapefruit shattered car windows in Johnson City, Texas. In June, 2024, a storm chaser found a hailstone almost as big as a pineapple. Even larger hailstones have been documented in South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska. Hail has damaged airplanes and even crashed through the roofs of houses.
How do hailstones get so large, and are hailstorms getting worse?
As an atmospheric scientist, I study and teach about extreme weather and its risks. Here’s how hail forms, how hailstorms may be changing, and some tips for staying safe.
How does hail get so big?
Hail begins as tiny crystals of ice that are swept into a thunderstorm’s updraft. As these ice embryos collide with supercooled water – liquid water that has a temperature below freezing – the water freezes around each embryo, causing the embryo to grow.
Supercooled water freezes at different rates, depending on the temperature of the hailstone surface, leaving layers of clear or cloudy ice as the hailstone moves around inside a thunderstorm. If you cut open a large hailstone, you can see those layers, similar to tree rings.
The path a hailstone takes through a thunderstorm cloud, and the time it spends collecting supercooled water, dictates how large it can grow.
Rotating, long-lived, severe thunderstorms called supercells tend to produce the largest hail. In supercells, hailstones can be suspended for 10-15 minutes or more in strong thunderstorm updrafts, where there is ample supercooled water, before falling out of the storm due to their weight or moving out of the updraft.
Hail is most common during spring and summer when a few key ingredients are present: warm, humid air near the surface; an unstable air mass in the middle troposphere; winds strongly changing with height; and thunderstorms triggered by a weather system.
Larger hail, more damage
Hailstorms can be destructive, particularly for farms, where barrages of even small hail can beat down crops and damage fruit.
As hailstones get larger, their energy and force when they strike objects increases dramatically. Baseball-sized hail falling from the sky has as much kinetic energy as a typical major league fastball. As a result, property damage, such as to roofs, siding, windows, and cars, increases as hail gets larger than the size of a quarter.
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James' World 2 