What Nuclear War Means for the Ocean
Imagine the South China Sea: not as balmy waters dotted by palm-fringed islands, but covered in a sheet of ice. The deeper waters have cooled, too—not like the surface, but enough to alter the currrents that flow between Earth’s equator and its southern pole. In the ensuing ecological cataclysm, humans depend on seaweed for their survival.
That’s not the usual picture of post-nuclear apocalypse. Most popular fictions of the subject have focused on terrestrial impacts, and scientific research has shared that tendency. But factor in the ocean, suggest researchers whose simulations did just that, and humanity is looking less at a nuclear winter than what they call “a Nuclear Little Ice Age.”
One of those researchers is Owen Toon, a geophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder. In the 1980s, Toon worked alongside Carl Sagan as part of the first generation of environmental scientists to model the planetary
