Unearthing the Future explored how clues from Earth’s past can help readers more deeply understand modern climate change. We followed scientists to four places where their research is looking to unlock secrets held in rock, coral and wood – deciphering a diary of Earth’s past – to help guide humanity toward the future.
Combining photos, videos, graphics and cutting-edge design, we tried to make the reader feel as though they were in the field with scientists. Sarah Kaplan and Bonnie Jo Mount traveled to Ontario, where some scientists believe that the changes recorded in the sediment of Crawford Lake show that Earth has entered a new chapter in geologic time: The Anthropocene. We took readers under the waters of the lake, showing them how scientists extracted a sediment core. A similar approach was taken for a story of research on the Greenland Ice sheet, where scientists tried to drill more than 1,600 feet under the ice to extract rocks that could tell the fate of the ice sheet – and the planet. A crack in the ice nearly doomed the experiment. In that story, we used video to show the harsh conditions and 3-D graphics to illustrate how a drill can cut through so much ice.
For “Ancient Warning of a Rising Sea,” readers were transported to cliffs above the beaches of the Seychelles, were fossilized corals marked where the ocean once reached and where it could someday rise again. The opening passage of “Written in the Wood,” presented in fragments alongside a scrolling exploration of the core from a tree that stopped growing in extreme heat, resembled the lyrics of a song or the stanzas of a poem. The sequence created a sense of rhythm in a graphic and made art out of text on a page. With each piece, we sought to illuminate an ethos that Anthropocene researcher Francine McCarthy shared with Sarah in their first interview: “It’s not just a doomsday story, it’s a ‘wake up and smell the coffee story.’ It shows we can make meaningful change.”
