Tapio Schneider, Colleen M. Kaul, and Kyle G. Pressel, “Possible climate transitions from breakup of stratocumulus decks under greenhouse warming,” Nature Geoscience, no.12 (2019): 163-167.
Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 5.
The first International Cloud Atlas was compiled by Swedish meteorologist Hugo Hildebrand Hildebrandsson, Swiss meteorologist Albert Riggenbach and French meteorologist Léon Philippe Teisserenc de Bort for the order of the International Meteorological Committee (which later became the World Meteorological Organization). Lorraine Daston, “Cloud Physiognomy,” Representations 135, no. 1 (2016): 45-71. More on the genre of scientific atlases, see Lorrain Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). See also, H. Hildebrandsson, A. Riggenbach, and L. Teisserenc de Bort, International Cloud-Atlas (Paris: Gauthier-Villars et Fils, 1896).
“Homogenitus,” International Cloud Atlas: Manual of the Observation of Clouds and Other Meteors, World Meteorological Organization, ➝.
As Lorraine Daston writes: “Species evolve over epochs and eons; clouds evolve over minutes and seconds.” Daston, “Cloud Physiognomy,” 49.
Ishimaru Yūkichi, Cloud Atlas: Kumo no shashin to zukai: Kumogaku kaku ron (Tokyo: The Hokuryukan Co. Ltd., 1954), 2. The English title Cloud Atlas appears on the cover of the book, and hence I use this English title.
Ishimaru, Cloud Atlas, 248.
His description of the mushroom cloud photograph from Operation Crossroads includes the following note: “Even though this is [an example of
an anthropogenic cloud, this unimaginable sight makes me wonder about the incredibly calamitous space beneath it.” But his reference to the destructive force of the atomic bomb ends there. Unable to reveal the slow violence of radiation, Ishimaru’s text risks reducing this photographic document to a mere specimen of a cloud “type.” Ishimaru, Cloud Atlas, 248.
More on this history, see Mark R. Peattie, Nan’yō: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885-1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988). On the militarization of the US controlled territories in the Pacific, including Guam, see Jodi Kim, Settler Garrison (Durham: Duke UP, 2022).
The 2020 Report to Congress by the Department of Energy states: “The Runit Dome is a containment structure on Runit Island, located on Enewetak Atoll. Enewetak Atoll is a former U.S. atmospheric nuclear weapons test site located in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, approximately 2,300 miles west of Hawaii in the northwest Pacific Ocean. In 1947, prior to the start of nuclear weapons testing on Enewetak, the approximately 150 residents of Enewetak Atoll were relocated to Ujelang Atoll, approximately 155 miles southwest of Enewetak. The people of Enewetak returned to their ancestral homeland in 1980 following an extensive cleanup and rehabilitation program; however, Runit Island has remained uninhabited. The containment structure, built in the late 1970s, contains over 100,000 cubic yards of radioactively contaminated soil and debris that were encapsulated in concrete (waste pile) inside an unlined nuclear test crater, the Cactus Crater, on the north end of Runit Island. The waste pile was subsequently covered over by a non-loadbearing, exterior concrete cap to help protect it from natural erosion. The site has remained a concern to the people of Enewetak and their leadership”(iii). See The United States Department of Energy, Report on the Status of the Runit Dome in the Marshall Islands, Report to Congress, June 2020.
Hi’ilei Julia Hobart, “Atomic Histories and Elemental Futures across Indigenous Waters,” Media+Environment 3,no. 1 (2021), ➝.
Hi’ilei Julia Hobart writes: “As an affront to the facades of stability maintained by the bases themselves, the infrastructures built to contain nuclear contamination have been revealed as fragile…. Cost-cutting measures during the dome’s construction reveal the contours of the RMI sacrifice zone (Lerner 2012): the United States employed soldiers at half the pay of nuclear specialists to clean up on Ānewetak, failing to issue protective gear and later denying medical coverage for the cancers they would develop (Willacy 2017); the architects of the dome furthermore did not account for anthropogenic changes to the environment, including sea level rise and extreme weather events, like typhoons, that may lead to the “catastrophic failure” of the structure (Gerrard 2015, 93).The recent discovery of radioactive giant clams in the surrounding sea offers vibrant evidence that the dome is leaking radiation into the Pacific” (10). Hi’ilei Julia Hobart, “Atomic Histories and Elemental Futures across Indigenous Waters,” Media+Environment 3, no.1, ➝.
Barbara Rose Johnston, “Nuclear Disaster: The Marshall Islands Experience and Lessons for a Post-Fukushima World,” Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan (New York: Routledge, 2015), 145.
Paul N. Edward, “Entangled histories: Climate science and nuclear weapons research,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68, no.4 (2012): 30.
Carl Sagan, “Nuclear Winter in the Post-Cold War Era,” Journal of Peace Research, vol.30, no.4 (1993): 369-373.
Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming: Revised and Expanded Edition (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2008), 23-24.
Alan Robock, “New Models Confirm Nuclear Winter,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 45, no.7 (September 1989): 32-35; Paul J Crutzen and Hans Günter Brauch, eds. Paul J Crutzen: A Pioneer on Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Change in the Anthropocene, Springer Briefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, Nobel Laureates, 50. (2016), 43.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry no. 35 (2009):221.
Kathryn Yusoff, “Anthropogenesis: Origins and Endings in the Anthropocene,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no2 (2016): 20.
Kim Tallbear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 34.
For instance, in his analysis of the Manhattan Project, Joseph Masco locates the starting date of the Anthropocene in the 1960s due to the sharp increase of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing that led to the environmental accumulation of human-made radioactive isotopes such as strontium 90. Joseph Masco, “Flashblindess,” in Through Post-Atomic Eyes, ed. Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), 101-102. Originally, the concept of the Anthropocene was popularized by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen. In the 2002 article, “Geology of Mankind,” published in Nature, Crutzen argued: “It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene — the warm period of the past 10–12 millennia. The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens to coincide with James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784” (23).
Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519. no. 7542 (2015): 176.
Lewis and Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” 175.
Lewis and Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” 175.