The Wrong End of the Telescope

It’s time this piece had a home. I’m finally publishing it, here.

From the rest quarters at the hub at the building, I walk outwards. Then hit a curved wall. The stairs have rotated away. So, I slink untethered through darkness, coiled snake power cords above and cold ground below, until the stairway looms, then climb to where mirrors fold billion-year light into sensors and screens flicker numbers. A little white dome rolling under the big black dome, feebly tracking pinpricks of light. I look down at my equations and wilt. When will it end?

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Jessica T Miskelly
In Deep Water off Antarctica

During the last deglaciation fifteen thousand years ago, global sea level rose nearly sixty feet in less than five hundred years. Known as meltwater pulse 1A, this event was discovered in 1989 via shallow-dwelling corals found in the deep sea, bolstering emerging theories that climate change could be rapid. Ice and sediment cores in Greenland had already revealed evidence of recurrent spikes in atmospheric temperature of 10 to 15 degrees Celsius during the last sixty thousand years, and these spikes were closely spaced in time with other sea-level rise events. Ice sheet formation and decay clearly played a role in these climate changes, and the game was on to determine how, and how much.

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Jessica T Miskelly