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The Great Lakes are having Great Snowstorms partly thanks to climate change.

It started with the cinematic, widely serenaded death of spunky little spacebot Cassini, closing out a 13-year mission to Saturn with a headlong dive into the planet’s gaseous atmosphere.

Meanwhile, back on a more familiar planet, an orbiting satellite named DMSP F19 quietly blinked out. The DMSP weather-tracking satellites have meticulously recorded Arctic sea ice coverage since 1978, which makes them one of our longest-running climate observations. But in 2015, Congress voted to mothball the last satellite in the series. Now, on the cusp of the biggest planetary shift humans have ever seen, we stand to lose one of our best means for understanding it.

Also this year, I started following LandsatBot, a project by Welsh glaciologist Martin O’Leary that tweets out random satellite views of Earth’s surface hourly. Like a geographic Chat Roulette, LandsatBot scratches the same imaginative itch that high-def images of Saturn’s rings do, but its alien views are all terrestrial. From satellite height, every landscape looks like an abstract painting, all fractal rivers and impressionist daubs of cloud.

These days, amidst an unending torrent of Game of Thrones gifs, signs of the end of democracy, and variations on that distracted boyfriend meme, I sometimes come across a Landsat image dropped without comment into the clutter. I stop and stare. Whether it’s an astroturf-green wedge of land somewhere in the Indonesian archipelago or the Crest-colored swirl of icy Antarctic seas, I try to imagine the world down there: A place I will probably never go, without landmarks or footprints, but irrevocably changed by us. Whether you recognize it or not, it’s home.

Amelia Urry is an associate editor at Grist.

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The Great Lakes are having Great Snowstorms partly thanks to climate change.

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"Cosmos" Just Got Nominated for 12 Emmys

Mother Jones

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It was a truly groundbreaking moment in television. Educationally driven science content was once anathema on primetime television, but earlier this year, Seth Macfarlane, Neil deGrasse Tyson and company set out to prove that wrong with Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a remake of the classic Carl Sagan-hosted show from 1980.

And if today’s Emmy nominations mean anything, the result is a major triumph. Cosmos has received 12 of them.

That’s not quite as good as the 19 for Game of Thrones, or 16 for Breaking Bad, but it’s a very significant number, and it includes nominations for “Outstanding Documentary Or Nonfiction Series,” “Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming” (for writers Ann Druyan and Steven Soter), “Outstanding Direction for Nonfiction Programming” (for director Brannon Braga).

In fact, that’s actually a tie with HBO’s True Detective, which also got 12 nominations.

Recently, I interviewed Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the face of the new show, who remarked on how to interpret its success. “You had entertainment writers putting The Walking Dead in the same sentence as Cosmos,” said Tyson. “Game of Thrones in the same sentence of Cosmos. ‘How’s Cosmos doing against Game of Thrones?’ That is an extraordinary fact, no matter what ratings it earned.”

The Emmy nominations will certainly give entertainment writers another such opportunity. In fact, it’s already happening. And when a science television show is celebrated by the deacons of popular culture, that can only be good news for the place of science in American society. (Note: the Showtime climate change documentary Years of Living Dangerously also received 2 Emmy nominations.)

The Cosmos nominations are for:

Outstanding Documentary Or Nonfiction Series

Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming

Outstanding Direction for Nonfiction Programming

Outstanding Art Direction for Variety, Nonfiction, Reality or Reality Competition Program

Outstanding Cinematography for Nonfiction Programming

Outstanding Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming

Outstanding Main Title Design

Outstanding Musical Composition for a Series (Original Dramatic Score)

Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music

Outstanding Sound Editing for Nonfiction Programming (Single or Multi-Camera)

Outstanding Sound Mixing for Nonfiction Programming and

Outstanding Special and Visual Effects.

The full list of Emmy nominations can be found here.

To listen to our Inquiring Minds podcast interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, you can stream below:

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"Cosmos" Just Got Nominated for 12 Emmys

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