Image: John Tyndall’s discovery that gases could trap heat provided the first hints of the mechanism behind climate change (Image: 1873, The Graphic)From New Scientist:
As an antidote to this year's Darwin-mania, we celebrate a piece of science from 1859 that wasn't remotely controversial at the time, but which underpins the hottest political potato of our era: climate change. In May 1859, six months before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Irish physicist John Tyndall proved that some gases have a remarkable capacity to hang onto heat, so demonstrating the physical basis of the greenhouse effect. Charles Darwin had journeyed round the world and ruminated for 20 years before presenting his inflammatory ideas on evolution. Tyndall spent just a few weeks experimenting in a windowless basement lab in London.
"THE scene was one of the most wonderful I had ever witnessed. Along the entire slope of the Glacier des Bois, the ice was cleft and riven into the most striking and fantastic forms. It had not yet suffered much from the warming influence of the summer weather, but its towers and minarets sprang from the general mass with clean chiselled outlines." John Tyndall was entranced by the Alps, in particular the great glaciers that creaked and groaned as they crept down the mountains. He found the Mer de Glace especially captivating: the largest glacier in France was a deep river of ice that stretched down the north slope of Mont Blanc and spilled out into the Chamonix valley near the hamlet of Les Bois.
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